Though Basil Bunting once called her "the best living poetess," Lorine Niedecker's death went virtually unnoticed. To readers familiar with her work she is an enigmatic, nearly legendary, figure; and even to those who actually knew her, she remains something of a mystery. But the mystery is not difficult to solve--Lorine Niedecker Millen simply had "more trees for friends than people," as she wrote to Cid Corman in 1965, and chose to live most of her sixty-seven years in a cabin on a small island near a small town in Wisconsin. Her death certificate records her "Usual Occupation" as "author and poet" and her "Kind of Business or Industry" as "housewife." For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s she also scrubbed floors and cleaned the kitchens in the local hospital while she wrote poetry that "sweetened by the way/she saw the good/imaginable America."

These...