Women appear fairly regularly as winners, beginning with Viola C. I’ll begin by noting that there had been some diversity-not much, but some-in terms of race and gender, in the Yale series prior to 1998. And as such, I felt it was important that they be represented equally with other poets in the series who went on to become some of the major poets of our time. They are part of the record, not just of the landscape of American poetry, but of the Yale series itself. The early poets in the Yale series are nevertheless writing poems of their own time. I don’t think all of the earlier Yale poets were necessarily naive, but my sense is that they didn’t yet have available to them the ways of expressing interiority, or of situating the self in relationship to such large external factors as war-also identity, also language itself-that would come later, with Modernism, confessional poetry, and such pivotal events as the Civil Rights movement, the feminist movement, the Stonewall riots, to name but a few.

One can always point to exceptions, but overall the poetry of that period seems to long for a time of innocence, which of course always comes with naïveté, as well. My own sense of the poetry of that period, which pre-dates the innovations of the Modernists, is that there was not only more acceptance of sentimentality and nostalgia, but often a preference for those things, in poetry at least.

As I read through the early volumes of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (1919-), so many of them by poets who had only recently graduated from college, and so many having been affected either by actual combat in World War I or by having come of age in the psychological wake of that war, it occurred to me that these poets were writing the only poems they could, in the best ways they knew how.

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