April Twilights

infobox Book |
name = April Twilights
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image_caption = First edition cover
author = Willa Cather
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country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Poetry
publisher = The Gorham Press
release_date = 1903
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pages =
isbn =
preceded_by =
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"April Twilights" is a 1903 collection of poems by Willa Cather. It was reedited by Cather in 1923 and 1933 [Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page 75] . The poems were first published in many literary reviews [Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages 53-58] , often under pen names [Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page 59] .

Literary significance and criticism

Cather's influences for the poems were, among others, Anthony Hope's "The Prisoner of Zenda", Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Richard Wagner, Virgil's "Georgics", William Shakespeare, François Villon, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, John Keats's "Endymion" and "Hyperion", Alphonse Daudet's "Kings in Exile", Heinrich Heine's "The Gods in Exile" and "The North Sea", and Edward Coley Burne-Jones [Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages xxv-xxviii] .

Cather's favourite poems were "Grandmither", "Mills of Montmartre" and "The Hawthorn Tree" [Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xxiii] .

At the time of publication, the collection received mixed reviews; the Pittsburgh "Gazette", the "New York Times Saturday Review", "Academy and Literature", the "Criterion", the "Bookman", the "Chicago Tribune", and the "Poet Lore" praised it; The Dial thought it was bland [Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages xxi-xxiii] . Cather decided to buy the remaining copies and burn them [Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xxiii] .

Mark Twain praised her poem "The Palatine" [Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, "April Twilights", University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xliii] .

It has been noted that Cather broaches 'the enduring aura of a homosexual myth' as she alludes to Antinous several times in her poems [John P. Anders, "Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition", University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 21] .

References