Perhaps because he wrote verse even before he turned to short fiction and drama (his poems, in fact, began to appear in little magazines as early as 1933, prior to his first plays being given amateur productions), Tennessee Williams often used poetry - his own and that of others - as intertext in his works for the stage. Over a dozen of his full-length plays in their printed versions feature epigraphs from writers as various as Sappho, Dante, Rimbaud, Yeats and, an especial favorite of his, Hart Crane. Both Summer and Smoke (1947) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) incorporate a poem that provides a key to the drama. In the former, the Southern parson's daughter, Alma Winemiller, recites William Blake's “Love's Secret,” albeit in altered form, at her literary club gathering, not only foreshadowing the course the action will take as she loses Dr. John Buchanan to another, but also hinting at the rejection that may be visited upon a somehow forbidden '”Love that never told can be.” In the latter, the 97-year-old minor poet Jonathan Coffin (called Nonno) exuberantly declaims his final poem - only slightly revised from one the playwright himself wrote on a visit to Mexico in 1940 - about the decay that inevitably follows the ripening of all things living, pleading for the “courage” necessary to endure in the face of awareness of mortality.