When the poet Léonie Adams died last June at the age of eighty-eight, she had not published a book in thirty-four years, and had not been near the center of the literary action for over half a century. At one time her work had been included, as a matter of course, in the major anthologies of modern American poetry; by the 1980s, however, her name had virtually disappeared from the literary record: none of her poems appear in The Norton Anthology of American Poetry, and even David Perkins’s encyclopedic History of Modern Poetry, which finds room for everyone from Richard Hovey and Robert Hillyer to William Vaughn Moody and Alfred Noyes, manages to omit her. Given this state of affairs, perhaps it was only to be expected that the headline of her obituary in The New York Times should have read not “Léonie Adams, Poet” but “Léonie Adams, Poetry Consultant.” (Among the many honors that Adams received during her career was the consultantship in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1948-49.) Such ubiquitous neglect of Adams’s oeuvre by the literary movers and shakers of our time is not only unjustified but truly lamentable, for more than a few of her poems remain powerful and affecting, and certainly a good deal more accomplished than much of what passes for first-rate verse nowadays.

It was during the 1920s—the height of literary modernism—that Adams knew her greatest fame. At that time, the American poetic landscape—which was then defined