An American Romance is the intimate story of the love between a man named Lawrence and a woman named Renee, two intelligent, intensely romantic people. They approach and discover one another gracefully, with a solemn ardor, an ardor which contains both brightness and darkness, and they find that forgiveness is the key to understanding. Songs of Rapture and Other Poems, included as an appendix within this book, is a mystical journey into the interior of every man and woman's heart. It speaks of things, both of gilded rays and of deep, profound shadows, which surpass the realm of all music. The poet takes the reader through the golden, sunny corners of the psyche's most wondrous daylight to the blackest regions of the human mind.