Famous for his modernist fiction, Ohio native Sherwood Anderson has long been recognized almost exclusively as a prose writer despite his prolific published output of poetry between 1915 and 1939. In American Spring Song, editor Stuart Downs reintroduces readers to a body of work rarely seen and never before studied.

With an experimental sensibility, Anderson's poetry ranges from Whitmanesque to imagist to objectivist to surrealist, making its perspectives on the human...