"I do not take myself seriously as a poet," said Willa Cather in a 1925 interview. Having by then published many short stories and six novels (of an eventual twelve) and having won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours (1922), Willa Cather was already established as a major American writer of fiction. Yet her first published book had been April Twilights (1903), a poetry collection, and, though her total output of verse was small (fewer than eighty-five poems--even including translations, juvenilia, and pseudonymous works, some of which can never be officially attributed), she included thirty-five poems in her collected works, The Novels and Stories of Willa Cather (1937-1941), the repository of writing she judged her best. How, then, do we interpret her statement: frank evaluation, deprecation, invitation to contradiction? Any of these attitudes could be valid for Willa Cather, who to the end of her life was both...