Sara Teasdale, born and raised in St. Louis and one of our most celebrated poets in her time, gradually fell out of favor after her death. The image she was willing to benefit from—that of a romantic yearning for erotic fulfillment—did not help her status during the heyday of the New Criticism. Yet she was never entirely the poet her contemporary audience preferred her to be. She wrote powerful antiwar poems—two of them reprinted here—but chose not to include them in any of her books. And her well-known poems have an easy fluency that makes them modern in a different register.

Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Jamaica and New York City. She was educated at Williams College and Columbia University. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. She now teaches at Pomona College. She is a poet, editor, playwright, and multimedia artist. Politically astute and invariably ironic about contemporary American life, she tracks its effects on language, institutions, and cultural understanding.

Janice N. Harrington was born in Vernon, Alabama, and grew up there and in Lincoln, Nebraska. She is a poet, a children’s book author, and a professional storyteller. A former librarian, she now teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The two poems here are reprinted from her book Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007).

Elinor Wylie was born in New Jersey and grew up in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., the child of a prominent family. As an adult she became poetry editor of Vanity Fair and a contributing editor to The New Republic. The poems often combine exquisite craft with a powerful sense of isolation, sometimes with an aura of death. Their precision also bears comparison with imagist practice, especially with some of Amy Lowell’s and H.D.’s early poetry. After a series of heart attacks, Wylie died of a stroke at age forty-three.