May Swenson, Utah-born poet of Swedish Mormon immigrant parents, whom critic John Hollander calls “one of our few unquestionably major poets,” was within a few days of her thirty-sixth birthday when she met Pearl Schwartz. A woman of Mediterranean descent just past twenty-six, Schwartz was an attendant at a contagious disease hospital. Swenson would soon cross the threshold of a fertile creative crescent in which many of her most evocative love poems would emerge, as well as a broad variety of other work that would appear in her first book, Another Animal in 1954. Later, the two would travel by Greyhound to Utah, where Pearl met May’s Mormon family. (An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first annual May Swenson Symposium at Utah State University this past June.)

Paul Swenson, Laraine Wilkens