May Swenson

Poet Class of 1987
location icon Location
Sea Cliff, New York
age iconAge
68 at time of award
age iconDate Deceased
December 04, 1989
area of focus iconArea of Focus

About May's Work

May Swenson was a poet who used nature as a symbol of the human spirit.

She was known for her inventiveness with sounds and shapes, technical capacity, and sense of human sympathy.  Swenson’s books of poetry include Another Animal (1954), A Cage of Spines (1958), To Mix with Time (1963), Poems to Solve (1963), Half Sun, Half Sleep (1967), Iconographs (1970), More Poems to Solve (1971), New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978), In Other Words (1987), The Love Poems of May Swenson (1991), Nature: Poems Old and New (1994), and May Out West (1996).  Her poems appeared in such publications as the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Parnassus, and Poetry.

Biography

Swenson was poet-in-residence at Purdue University, the University of North Carolina, Bryn Mawr College, Lethbridge University, Utah State University, and the University of California, Riverside.  She also served as the editor at New Directions publishers (1959-66) and as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (1980-89).  She was the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller (1955), Guggenheim (1959), and Ford (1964) Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts (1974).  Among her honors was the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1981) from Yale University. 

Swenson received a B.A. (1939) from Utah State University.

Last updated January 1, 2005.

Published on July 1, 1987

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