Largely unknown today, Dunstan Thompson was once one of the most celebrated young poets in America. Published during and shortly after WWII, his often harrowing, homoerotic poems---many set on
the battlefields and in the hospitals of the European Theater---were compared favorably to the work of W. H. Auden, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas. Then, as far as the general public was
concerned, Dunstan Thompson disappeared. In a series of essays, interviews, letters, and clippings, this book traces Dunstan Thompson's journey from a wildly successful literary enfant
terrible, through his strong Catholic reawakening, and into his later years as a writer of mature, meditative, largely unpublished poetry. The first in Pleiades Press's Unsung Masters Series
devoted to great out-of-print writers, this book also includes a selection of Dunstan Thompson's very best poetry.
"Reading through this lovingly assembled compendium of poems, essays, remembrances and photographs is like watching a team of preservationists restore a fallen statue that, once set aright and
viewed in full, will never again be neglected. With great scruple and care, editors D. A. Powell and Kevin Prufer have turned Dunstan Thompson's reemergence into nothing short of a literary
event---one whose impact will be felt for a long time to come. While the unfettered sensuality, formal mastery, unstinting inventiveness and emotionality of Thompson's early poems make them
downright hard to resist, appreciating them within their biographical, literary, and social contexts (a feat this edition amply facilitates) makes them all but impossible to forget. Thompson
provides a new reference point for our understanding of postwar American poetry, and the facts of his life---the unabashedness of his gay youth in New York, his WWII military service, his
status as an expat, his return to the religious orthodoxy of his childhood, the sea-change to his poetry it accompanied or perhaps effected, his gradual disappearance---belong not simply to a
poet, but to a full-fledged literary figure. We waited too long for Thompson's rediscovery without even knowing it, but the wait is over. He's here."---Timothy Donnelly
