Born in 1913 to Swedish immigrant parents living in Logan, Utah, May Swenson was raised in an observant Mormon household, the oldest daughter of ten, before moving to Depression-era New York City to embark on a career as a poet. A forerunner of eco-poetics who sought common ground between human and animal experience, a daring writer of love poems who gave voice to queer desire in an era of widespread self-censorship and sexual repression, Swenson stands as a singular, experimental voice in American letters whose moment—nearly four decades after her death in 1989—has finally arrived.
In the revelatory new biography The Key to Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life (Princeton, 2025), author Margaret A. Brucia mines the diaries and letters of this remarkable poet to offer a never-before-seen glimpse into her life and mind, using Swenson’s own words to tell the story. “What emerges is an intimate portrait of a woman and poet breathing deeply of the rich world around her,” writes Peter-Christian Aigner, director of The Gotham Center for New York City History.
Below, Brucia and Professor Paul Crumbley, the Swenson expert who with David Hoak wrote the biography’s foreword, discuss the research that went into The Key to Everything, Swenson’s longstanding correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, and the poet’s connection to another ahead-of-her-time Library of America author, Margaret Fuller.
Library of America: Could you tell us about the genesis of this book and how you learned about May Swenson?
Margaret A. Brucia: I am a classicist whose specialty is Augustan literature and whose poets—Catullus, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid—are far from the modernist world of May Swenson. In 2010, when I was teaching in the Classics Department at Temple University in Rome, I discovered in a flea market a significant correspondence of more than two hundred Gilded Age letters from a New York socialite to her daughter, the young wife of an Italian nobleman. The letters featured a host of prominent early-twentieth-century New Yorkers, about whom I published eight articles on CUNY’s Gotham blog. This serendipitous discovery was the beginning of an ongoing fascination with women’s private and unfiltered diaries, letters, and journals.
The Key To Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life (Princeton, 2025)
I now live in the small village of Sea Cliff, on the north shore of Long Island, where May Swenson resided for the last twenty-two years of her life. Swenson’s literary executor is also a Sea Cliff resident, and, aware of my interest in letters and diaries, she invited me in 2019 to write a new biography of Swenson. As enticement, she offered early access to Swenson’s as-yet-unarchived diaries from 1935 to 1959. She provided me with photocopies—more than six hundred pages—some typed by May, most written in her tiny, casual scrawl. As I was pondering how to shape the biography, I came upon a diary entry May wrote in 1952, when she was thirty-nine: “I want to confirm my life in a narrative—my Lesbianism, the hereditary background of my parents, grandparents, origins in the ‘old country.’” My method suddenly became clear: I would step back and allow May’s distinctive, authentic narrative voice—so evident in the diaries—to take precedence. The Key to Everything is May Swenson’s story, told, as much as possible, in her own words.
Paul Crumbley: When Margaret began work on the book in 2019, just before the pandemic, she contacted me and asked if she could consult with me at different stages in the process. I said I would happily help in any way I could. The idea that a new and long-overdue biography was underway was tremendously exciting, especially since the author had the support of the May Swenson Literary Estate. When a year or so later I read Margaret’s Gotham blogs containing excerpts from the book, I was immediately impressed. She has a gift for working with diaries, integrating material, and deciding what to include. Swenson’s diaries are fairly expansive, so she had to select carefully, and I think she did that beautifully.
Swenson photographed atop the Empire State Building in 1946 (Utah State University / Estate of May Swenson)
MB: Although May was a lifelong diarist, I was offered her extant diaries dated only until 1959. Thirty years of May’s life were therefore unaccounted for in diary form. Fortunately, May engaged in a twenty-nine-year correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, beginning in 1950 and ending in 1979, the year of Bishop’s death. May preserved carbon copies of her letters to Elizabeth as well as Elizabeth’s replies. Their two-way correspondence, about 275 letters, is archived among the Swenson Papers at Washington University in St. Louis. The Swenson-Bishop correspondence served as a valuable substitute for the later diaries. Additionally, the abundance in the archives of May’s letters to family, friends, lovers, and professional colleagues, and her autobiographical prose and poetry, were all helpful in maintaining the flow of May’s narrative voice into her later years.
LOA: Swenson traveled an immense distance in her life, from Utah, where she was born, to the literary heart of New York City. Can you talk about her origins and background?
MB: May was raised in Logan, Utah, by loving immigrant parents who were devout converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. May’s first language was Swedish, and the LDS Church was at the center of her family life. As the oldest of ten children, May was expected from a young age to help her mother run the house and mind the children. May washed dishes, scrubbed floors, ironed shirts, put up and stored fruits and vegetables, gave her sisters haircuts, and invented stories and games for her siblings, who adored her. May’s brother George referred to her as “an ideal older sister” and recalled that when she told her brothers and sisters stories, “she put into words her dreams.” Whenever May could free herself from chores, she sought solitude outdoors—in a hollowed-out haystack, on the roof of her father’s woodshed, in an apple tree—to read, to think, and to write.
She believed that poems had lives of their own, that she released them into the world.
PC: There are different accounts of how Swenson began to write poetry. One was that when she was twelve, her father gave her twenty blank books and encouraged her to record her thoughts there. One day her older cousin Sunny was reading over her entries and said, “This is poetry!” Swenson discovered, in this way, that she’d been writing poems all along, that poetry was a natural form of expression for her.
She wasn’t inclined to write poetry in the deliberate way a lot of people do, but that’s not to say she wasn’t disciplined. She made a point of writing every day, but it was like she was trying to catch the spark in the atmosphere. She often felt as if poems came to her, as if she were almost passively receiving them. She even used the word “dictation”: it was as if she were trying to keep up with the pace at which the poem was entering her thought process. Only her reception of it was something she had control over, and that included structuring the poem and polishing it.
The Swenson family in Utah (Utah State University) and Swenson’s circle of poet friends in New York (New York Historical)
LOA: How did Swenson describe her life in New York, this place she had romanticized and sought out?
MB: Swenson had long dreamed of living in New York, where so many of her literary and artistic heroes—people like Thomas Wolfe and Alfred Stieglitz—had found their creative center. In 1935, a year after her graduation from Utah State Agricultural College, May left home to live with Sunny in Salt Lake City. May supported herself by selling magazine ads. Sunny suggested that they travel together by bus to Michigan to pick up a new car her father had bought for her and then drive east, through Chicago and Canada and on to New York City. With two hundred dollars that she had borrowed from her father, May set out with Sunny in June of 1936. She told no one, not even Sunny, that she had no intention of returning to Utah.
May arrived in New York in the depths of the Depression with no contacts and little money. She was twenty-three years old. After finding an apartment to share with two LDS women, she placed an ad in The New York Times, offering her services as a typist and a writer. May highlighted her college degree and her training in the arts, adding that she would do anything “progressive and legitimate” to earn a living. Having accepted one low-paying job after another, May barely subsisted. Her clothes were tattered and she had holes in her shoes. In desperation May stole a dress from a department store. But she never wavered in her determination to succeed, to forge a career as a poet and to find her identity. Despite hardship, May loved New York and referred to it as “my city,” the place where she would find “glory” and fulfillment.
PC: When she got to the city, she wanted love, she wanted financial security, and she wanted artistic success. She was very determined and went through very difficult periods. In 1938, near the end of the Depression, she was down to eighteen cents and went on relief. She finally got a job with the Living Lore Unit of the Federal Writers’ Project, and through her work came to know Anca Vebrovska, her first long-term lover. She took art classes and drawing classes and sculpture classes and got to know different artists. She was always extremely earnest and dedicated and did not give in to despair or complaint. That may be part of her LDS upbringing—that optimistic nature. She didn’t express a lot of angst; she approached hardships as problems that needed to be solved.
LOA: Could you speak about the correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop? What did she and Swenson talk about and what drew them to each other?
MB: Swenson and Bishop met in 1950 when they were both residents at Yaddo. May was in awe of Bishop, who by then had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, published her first collection of poems (North & South), and served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Swenson wrote expansively and enthusiastically to her then-lover, Pearl Schwartz, about Bishop, describing in detail Bishop’s appearance and mannerisms. Bishop’s first impression of May, however, was far more tempered and succinct. To her friend the poet Robert Lowell, Bishop described Swenson as “a little poet, not bad, and a nice girl.”
Swenson at the MacDowell Colony, 1956 (Washington University)
In 1951 Bishop moved to Brazil, and Swenson, who was assembling material for her own application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote to her requesting a recommendation and advice. Bishop read May’s poems, which she liked very much, and guided her through the application process. Although initially their correspondence was primarily professional, in time their letters became more personal. But the heart of their correspondence was always their poetry and their professional achievements.
PC: Swenson and Bishop were very different poets. Swenson was much more daring and prolific: in the Collected Poems, you have about five hundred poems, and Bishop’s entire legacy is built around about one hundred poems.
Bishop dwelt on poems. She worked on them, sometimes for months at a time, and passed through a lot of uncertainty. Swenson dove into poems. She was willing to try out new things, willing to take risks. In one letter, she writes to Bishop that she imagines the writing of poems as getting naked on a diving board and then diving, which I’m sure struck Bishop as an alarming way to imagine writing poetry.
They had conversations—very indirect conversations—about how to communicate same-sex erotics, same-sex attraction. Swenson admired Bishop’s technique of being indirect about almost everything, but about her sexuality and erotics in particular. Swenson developed her own cagey techniques for doing that. She was often vague about the gender of speakers in her love poems, which were, knowing what we do now, very clearly written from a lesbian perspective.
LOA: Where does Swenson fit into the tradition of American poetry? How would you describe her style?
PC: She was an experimental poet, so it’s impossible to pigeonhole her. It would be accurate to call her a nature writer, a philosophical and metaphysical writer, a writer about science and sports, and an accomplished writer of love poems.
In terms of literary history and major women poets, you’d have to situate her in a line of descent from Emily Dickinson to Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop and Swenson. From the male poetic tradition, she’s drawing from Whitman, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In terms of experimentation with form, you’d have to go back to George Herbert in the seventeenth century, then the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French poet William Apollinaire. A nearer contemporary would be E. E. Cummings.
Examples of Swenson’s shaped poems from the 1970 collection Iconographs
One of her great aims as a poet—and this unites her with a lot of other artists—is to show how no two moments are the same, that the world we inhabit now is different than the world we inhabited when I started this sentence. This is why her writing is so fresh and so detailed. She saw each moment as a new and inspiring expression of a continuously unfolding universe.
Swenson thought of her poems as things that entered into the world, that were evolving, that got drawn into the process of natural selection. She believed that poems had lives of their own, that she released them into the world.
MB: Because The Key to Everything is a biography—not a critical biography—I concentrated on poems that fit comfortably into and enhanced the context of Swenson’s life. For example, I chose “The Centaur,” “Like Thee, Falcon,” “Mirage,” “The Garden at St. John’s,” “The Seed of My Father,” “My Name Was Called,” and “Guilty,” each of which speaks to how May felt at a precise moment in time.
Swenson’s poetry, autobiographical or not, often reminds me of Catullus’s poetry in its straightforward simplicity. Like Catullus, Swenson was a modernist, an experimental “new poet” unfettered by tradition. And, like Catullus, her language is direct, accessible and often playful. Both poets wrote passionate love poetry and took delight in little things in the world around them.
LOA: Where would you point readers to get a first taste of Swenson, to show them her poetic talents and what makes her unique?
May Swenson: Collected Poems
PC: The place to start would have to be “The Centaur.” It’s a very accessible poem—that’s one of the great things about Swenson—and a fun poem, and it gives you a lot of insight into her life. Then I would say “The Key to Everything,” from which Margaret takes the title of her book. That’s a wonderful poem about a speaker who’s in love with someone who’s going through a difficult time, and it suggests the possibility that if you ever plumb the depths of someone else, you can no longer be attracted to them; you’re probably likely to be despised by them.
There are poems like “Painting the Gate” that introduce people to Swenson’s sense of humor, and riddle poems designed for young adult readers, like “Living Tenderly” and “Was Worm.” For serious works, her poems “Any Object” and “The Truth is Forced” are astonishingly powerful and speak directly to the heart of who she is as a poet. Poems like “Question” and “Let Us Prepare” explore the afterlife, what happens when we no longer have bodies. They leave you with a sense of a life to come but do not resolve perplexity or offer final clarity.
MB: In addition to Paul’s excellent examples, I would also mention the poem “The Seed of My Father,” a tribute to the man who understood May best, who fostered her interest in nature, and who encouraged her to develop her talent for self-expression.
LOA: When you teach Swenson, what is the reaction? Do you see her as a poet whose readership continues to grow?
PC: I’m biased, but I really think that her moment has come, or that it’s arriving. The reviews of Margaret’s biography have been very positive. People are fascinated by her, and our moment in history may contribute to that. We’re a more receptive audience now than at the time of her death, in 1989. For example, today she lends herself to eco-poetic analysis: she thought of human beings as animals, and in her love poems, she often associates sexual intimacy with nature. She wants to situate our discoveries of who we are as sexual beings in a natural setting so that there’s no guilt, no judgment.
Undated photograph of Swenson (May Swenson Society)
She’s very much like Margaret Fuller, the nineteenth-century writer who, in 1845, wrote that there is no wholly masculine man, no wholly feminine woman, that we’re all mixes, and those mixes are shifting all the time. In that sense, Swenson is the descendant of Fuller, and she brings gender more to the surface of her writing than Fuller did. She can be a heroic poet for the LGBTQ community today.
I think of her religious poems, too. She was, at heart, a very spiritual person. Because of her focus on our link to the animal world, she thought that tie connected us to something like a life force: an omniscient, omnipotent, ongoing creative process that we can communicate with and that flows through all of us.
Photo: Raymond Derrien and Benedict Campbell
Margaret A. Brucia earned her PhD in Classics from Fordham University and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She is the author of The Key to Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life. She has published articles about prominent early twentieth-century New Yorkers, including two on May Swenson, on CUNY’s Gotham blog. Her other publications include To Be a Roman: Topics in Roman Culture and The Boor: Horace Satire 1.9.
Photo: Utah State University
Paul Crumbley is professor of English, emeritus, at Utah State University and the author of Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson and Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought, as well as coeditor of Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities, Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, and The Search for a Common Language: Environmental Writing and Education.
