The winning volume in the 1985 Yales Series of Younger Poets competition is George Bradley's Terms to Be Met. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: George Bradley belongs to a tradition of philosophical poets that includes Lucretius and Wallace Stevens. His lines are long, unfreighted, the easier to lift us to high and distant places, and to teach us to listen for 'the sound of the sun.'

In 1919 Yale University Press inaugurated the Yale Series of Younger Poets, designed to "afford a public medium for the work of young men and women who have not yet secured a wide public recognition." This anthology of the longest-running poetry series in the United States tells the story of American poetry in this century. At first a forum for a conservative taste in parochial college verse, the Younger Poets Series soon opened up to unconventional but profound young talents from across the country--such as James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, William Meredith, Adrienne Rich, John...