Best known for her gargantuan, elliptical novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young began her career as a lyric poet, working almost exclusively in the form until the mid-1940s. Her monumental study of two failed 19th century utopias in New Harmony, Indiana, Angel in the Forest, began as a collection of some sixty blank-verse sonnets, before she resorted to prose in order to incorporate more facts and figures that the poetic form would allow. Publisher's Weekly would say that the book was composed with "the extravagance of a poet rather than the pedantry of a historian".It is her poetry, writes Young in a previously unpublished introduction included here, that "pointed to what I would become, and there I now see the whole structure of my writing about which I may not have been wholly conscious at the time." She goes on to say that readers who encounter her poetry "may find keys to the understanding of all my life's work".Included in The Collected Poems are Young's two poetry collections, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1944)?-neither of which were reprinted after their initial runs?-uncollected poems that appeared in magazines like Accent, The Kenyon Review, and The Saturday Review of Literature, and a trove of previously unpublished poems, including early poems dictated from memory by Marguerite herself?-"I Heard a Bird", which opens the collection, was penned at the tender age of nine.