Alan Swallow - (1915-1966)
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I. Biography
Alan Swallow was a great poet in the sense that he was able to grab the reader with his imagery and emotion. Swallow did most of his own publishing as well as publishing other authors' pieces. His publishing company, The Swallow Press, was named after him.
In 1944, Alan Swallow became very interested in Yvor Winters which was a force of both regionalism and a cluster of attitudes. This literary movement was also known as the New Criticism. This was brought up to him from Southern Agrarians who also influenced him growing up. These people encouraged him to graduate from Louisiana State University. At Louisiana State Swallow started out as a reviewer of poetry for the New Mexico Quarterly during the forties. Swallow soon became a publisher at a Denver press which was soon renamed The Alan Swallow Press.
Swallow believed greatly in European Romanticism and built pieces from this movement, which was a movement in art, music, and literature originating in Europe in the 1800s. Soon Swallow started to show more interest in things such as literary methods, critical theory, and contemporary poetry; he wrote pieces such as "An Editor's Essay of Two Decades" which was an essay written about the decades. In addition, he wrote a book about the Southern Agrarians called I'll Take My Stand.
Swallow wrote in places such as Denver, Colorado; Seattle, Washington; Iowa City, Iowa; New York City, New York; and Prairie City, Illinois (WYLDCAT). He has also lived in New York, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Alan Swallow is famous for his poetry. In 1990, however, an award was created and presented to Alan Swallow for the fiction he had written. He received a prize from the American Academy of Poets for his poetry.
II. Literary Works- Selected List
Books
Two Stories
"An Editor's Essay of Two Decades"
Publishing In the West
Poems
"The Nameless Sight"
"The Remembered Land"
"The War Poems of Alan Swallow" (WYLDCAT).
Some of Alan Swallow and the Alan Swallow Press famous published materials include Winter's Primitivism, Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense.
Alan Swallow has been a great influence in literature. Through his short time he accomplished a lot, but Alan Swallow died too soon at the young age of fifty-one. Indeed, before he died he did infuse more "rationality" into his western poetry.
III. Work Cited
Funk and Wagnalls.The Reader's Digest.United States: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.1966, 1968.
"Alan Swallow". Wyoming Writers Database. May 24, 2000
http://cowgirl.state.wy.us/wywriters/record.cfm?AuthorID=1106
This essay was submitted by a student of Judy Iliff, a teacher at Campbell County High School in Gillette, Wyoming.