When Yvor Winters's publisher and friend Alan Swallow hailed him in 1940 as the "sage of Palo Alto," he accurately touched on the paradox of Winters's career: the isolation in which he became admired as a poet, a teacher, and critic of poetry. For Winters, who adopted California early in his career as his permanent home, participated in the major poetic and critical movements of the twentieth century--imagism, the expatriate transition scene, and new criticism--from afar: "In the 'twenties," he wrote in an autobiographical introduction to The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920-28 (1966), "I was not in Paris, nor even in Harvard." Nevertheless he became well known as a poet in the 1920s, as a strong moralistic critic in the 1930s, and, in his long career as a professor of English at Stanford University, as an advocate of neglected poets both living and dead, and as a teacher of...