SOURCE: "May Swenson: The Art of Perceiving," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. V, Winter, 1969, pp. 58-75.

Stanford was an American poet, educator, and critic. In this essay, she discusses the roles of observation and description in Swenson's poetry.

May Swenson is the poet of the perceptible. No writer employs with greater care the organs of sense to apprehend and record the surfaces of the world. She is the exemplar of that first canon of the poet—Behold!

From the time her poetry began appearing in the early 1950s in such places as New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Discovery, the New Yorker, and Poetry, Miss Swenson's work in its concentration on the sensible has been very much her own. The preoccupation with perception dominates the poetry of her successive volumes—Another Animal (1954), A Cage of Spines (1958), To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (1963), Poems...