Susan Stewart was born March 15, 1952, in York, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Dickinson College with a bachelor's degree in English and anthropology in 1973, received a master's degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins University in 1975, and earned a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. In 1978, Stewart also joined the faculty of Temple University as an assistant professor of English, becoming associate professor in 1981 and full professor in 1985. Since 1997, she has been the Regan Professor in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches the history of lyric poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature.

Stewart's first collection of poetry was Yellow Stars and Ice (1981). As of 2004, she had published three more collections: The Hive: Poems (1987), which won the Georgia Press Second Book award; The Forest (1995), in which "The Forest" appears; and Columbarium (2003), which won a 2003 National Book Critics Circle...