Although her contemporaries considered Willa Cather a traditionalist and thus antimodernist, encouraged by her critical statement that the world “broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” recent critical engagements with the author have looked to recover and emphasise her novels’ less obvious modernist tendencies. A snapshot of her writings in and about 1922 complicates both narratives. It is challenging to read Cather’s April Twilights and Other Poems (1923) as modernist in the wider context of 1922’s avant-garde formal innovations. For that reason, it offers a productive vantage point from which to revisit and rethink Cather and many other women writers’ problematic or “backwards” relationship to modernism. Subverting modernism’s emphasis on forward-oriented models of artistic development, Cather’s collection depicts a writer’s expanding authorial range, identity, and legacy through careful self-revision. Her conception of artistic development and periodisation at this point was directly influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose notions of time and “creative evolution” she cited in her 1922 Alexander’s Bridge preface. We argue for April Twilights and Other Poems to be read as an act of literary revisitation, where the temporal interface between older and newer poems conveys modernism’s uneven developments as a story that is told stylistically. Taken as a whole, Cather’s collection narrates the uneven processes through which many women writers responded to unfolding notions of authorship, periodisation, and literary modernity in the early twentieth century. This revisitation thus offers a timely test case of the extent to which modernism can (or cannot) be recognised as form, or approach, or period.