"A Stanley Burnshaw Reader" brings together selections from the major works of poetry and prose that have distinguished Burnshaw as one of the most important voices in twentieth-century letters. Included are essays from Burnshaw's two pioneering critical works: "The Seamless Web," praised by the New York Times Book Review as "a defense of poetry that removes it from the realm of man's spiritual luxuries and places it preeminently among his instruments of survival," and "The Poem Itself," a book that deals with forty-five poets of the last century in an entirely novel way which, as Lionel...

Stanley Burnshaw began to publish poems in the 1920s and founded his own verse journal in 1925. After serving as coeditor and drama critic of the New Masses weekly (1934-1936), he entered book publishing, directing the Dryden Press until 1958, when he joined Henry Holt. The first of his nineteen earlier works, Andre Spire and His Poetry, appeared in 1934 and the last in 1990, A Stanley Burnshaw Reader, with an introduction by Denis Donoghue.

The present volume--the definitive Burnshaw collection--offers all the poems he wishes to preserve and a...