Collected Poems, 1936-76

Francis is a modern American classic, better (say) than almost anyone who has been gifted with a Pulitzer or a National Book Award in recent decades. I claim him as better (say) than John Berryman or Robert Penn Warren or Delmore Schwartz or A. R. Ammons, and these people have written beautiful poems. As with Hardy, as with Frost, as with Richard Wilbur who has learned from him, Francis must be read in bulk. He does not write big poems. The accrual of small triumphs -- told in the same skeptical, tender, funny, and reticent language -- makes a big poem out of this Collected Poems.--Donald Hall Ohio Review

A nationally acclaimed poet, Robert Francis was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1984 for distinguished poetic achievement. His other honors include the Rome Prize Fellowship given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Club, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and the Brandeis Creative Arts Award. The University of Massachusetts Press named its annual Juniper Prize in honor of Francis, who for many years lived at Fort Juniper in Amherst.