Collected Poems: 1919-1979

Poetry. Women’s Studies. A key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, Madeline Gleason (1903-1979) is among the principal poets in the history of women’s writing. Associated early in her career with Robert Duncan and James Broughton, she was also much respected by the Beats, and she was one of the few women whose work was included in Donald Allen’s landmark anthology, The New American Poetry (1960). Here is a true born poet, of which there are always too few: a poet who cannot help thinking poetically and singing out of herself–James Broughton. In her own works she created a transition from the passional poetry close to Yeats as a master to an exuberant individual creation swinging in an ambit that could include Mother Goose and, long before ‘Pop Art, ‘ the voices of individual America–Robert Duncan. Edited and with a preface by Christopher Wagstaff