cover image The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams

The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams. New Directions Publishing Corporation, $29.95 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-8112-1508-4

Even after his plays made him a celebrity, Tennessee Williams ""identified himself, privately, as a lone and tortured poet,"" reveal editors Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel (co-editor, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes) in their introduction to The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams. Williams (1911-1983) wrote verse throughout his life, which is fully collected for the first time in this anthology. In the Winter of Cities and Androgyne, Mon Amour, the two collections Williams published in his lifetime, are here, as are uncollected pieces, verse from his plays and fiction, early works from the 1930s indebted to his hero Hart Crane, and even juvenilia by ""Thos. Williams, 9th gr."" (Apr. 24)