I have heard echoes and seen visions of you Often of late. Once yawning at a play A sad keen rapture suddenly pierced me through Because one puppet moved and sighed your way;
An omnibus’conductor fixed your glance — Intense, preoccupied — upon my fare ; I saw your stooping shoulders, at a dance, Lean by a doorway: but you were not there.
Down Oxford Street, in the slow shopping crowd, Hearing your very voice, ” Ah, that’s superb ” I turned, — a tawdry simpering little dowd Passed by, and left me trembling on the kerb.
from Songs for sale, an anthology of recent poetry, edited by Emily Beatrix Coursolles (E. B. C.) Jones Oxford: B. H. Blackwell; New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1918
On the few times I get to spend in a used bookstore, I find myself increasingly depressed at how often I can tell in a glance that there’ll be little chance of finding something I haven’t seen before. Which is, obviously, something of a natural consequence of running this site for over ten years. When this happens, I give it one last shot by heading for the poetry section.
If they have one. If they don’t, it’s time to abandon all hope.
If they do, there is a better chance of finding something hitherto unknown because by God there are a lot of skinny books of poetry that have been published over the last hundred-some years. A lot of it is pretty forgettable, as a growing stack of skinny books of poetry in my “To Donate” box attests. But there’s a good share that was doomed to neglect simply because it’s from too small a press, doesn’t include anything that got pulled into an anthology, or has some hideous design or amateur artwork that screams “Stay Away!” to all but worshippers of one of the poetic muses.
Or, as in the case of Helene Mullins’ collection, The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems, 1929-1969 (1970), so boring that it could easily be mistaken for a review draft. Except the one I found earlier this year was in immaculate shape, protected in Brodart, included an inscription by the author (“To Bob Adams with good wishes”), and sold for just $4. The Mirrored Walls came from a moderately well recognized publisher (Twayne) and included blurbs from John Hall Wheelock, Louis Untermeyer, and A. M. Sullivan, so it indicated that Mullins had made it under the mid-20th-century American poetry Big Top, if not quite into the center ring.
So who was Helene Mullins? Of the few online sources, the short bio sketch on the Yale Library page devoted to her papers (and those of her sister Marie McCall, who published a few novels) offers the most information. Born in New York City in 1899, she spent most of her life in the city. Married twice, began publishing poems in the early 1920s, including regular appearances in FPA’s (Franklin Pierce Adams) “Conning Tower” column in The New York World newspaper. Along with poetry, she wrote two novels early in her career — Paulus Fry: The History of an Esthete (1924), a quirky, elegant little jeux d’esprit in the vein of Carl Van Vechten and James Branch Cabell (“a flutterby-butterfly book,” one review called it), co-authored with her sister; and Convent Girl (1929). Convent Girl was an apparently autobiographical account of a girl’s life in a city convent boarding school for three years that was praised for its “clearness of vision” and “calm, well balanced prose, free of all flamboyant sentimentality and flashy brittleness, written frankly, and undoubtedly without prejudice.” She published four collections of poetry: Earthbound and Other Poems (1929); Balm in Gilead (1930); Streams from the Source (1938); and The Mirrored Walls. Married twice, she was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1935. She spent several weeks in a coma and it took her several years to recover. She lent her support to a number of liberal, human rights, and peace causes over the years, and died in 1991.
Mullins was one of the younger women poets to come to notice in the 1920s, when Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie reigned, but she quickly gained a solid foothold, publishing in Scribners, Commonweal, The Atlantic Monthly, and other popular magazines. She was among the more frequent contributors of poetry to The New Yorker in its first ten years.
Irony to the Ironical
Accept from me, at least, an admiration Not cultivated too laboriously. Most delicate shall be the situation, A matter of wit and wine and poetry.
You need not give me caution in exchange, For I am self-sufficient and content. I think that you are beautiful and strange, And willingly I yield to sentiment.
Passionate Beyond Belief
Passionate beyond belief Is the crisp and dying leaf. Watch it whirl through clouds of dust, Determined not (until it must) To yield and be forever still. What a brave display of will! What a glorious, futile fight! O gathering dark, O waiting night, Few such do you absorb when all The casualties of autumn fall.
I like the fact that this last little ode to death appeared alongside ads for Peek Frean biscuits, the National Horse Show, Kauffman for Riding Togs (since 1876), and Alix’ Famous Collarless Wrap from Bloomingdale’s. You can see why at least one acquaintance called her “a mix of Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay.” On the other hand, Mullins managed to rub Southern poet Allan Tate wrong in a big way: “I’m in favor of rejecting all verse henceforth by this piece of baggage! She’s the vulgarest, rudest wench I’ve yet graced with my presence. She also has a voice like the taste of a persimmon.”
Mullins’ basic style changed little over the years. Of her first collection, Earthbound and Other Poems, one reviewer wrote, “She is content to let the theme develop with practically no ornament; she delights in harmony but rarely employs counterpoint.” Of Balm in Gilead, another wrote that her verse “is honest, admirable, and wise”: “Constant war is being waged between her high heart and the lesson of bitter resignation she thinks we all must learn.”
A significant shift in perspective, however, can be detected in the poems found in Streams from the Source, the first collection to appear after her accident and convalescence:
She Marvels Over What They Say
It cannot last,” they said to me, When I with Love went dancing. “The end is always ruthlessly And quietly advancing.” But I knew better, being young. And I would not endeavor To understand a dismal tongue; My dance would last forever. Now that with Pain I’m lying prone, “It cannot last,” they tell me, And in a calm and soothing tone Endeavor to compel me To be assured the end will come. But though it chafe or grieve them, I find their comfort wearisome; I still do not believe them.
“Her lines are no longer founded on self-pity or self-preoccupation,” wrote Louis Untermeyer in The Saturday Review. “It is not an austerity so much as a gathering of intellectual forces, a translation of the fanciful in terms of the philosophic.”
Her subjects also shifted to social issues: unemployment, justice, and, with the start of World War Two, the fight against totalitarianism. “Interview with a Dictator,” for example, asks “What is it to be in power, a ruler of men/To advance beyond the humble of the earth/Who strive and suffer, and fall to rise again/Begging their fellows to recognize their worth?” These would remain a major focus of her work, at least as reflected in her last collection, The Mirrored Walls. In “How Forgive the Power of Rulers,” twenty years after “Interview,” her question remains essentially the same: “How forgive the power of rulers/waging wars with borrowed breath/of entertainers who copyright/our dramas of life and death.” (You can hear Mullins reading this and other poems, along with fellow poet Henrietta Weigel on a KPFA show from 1964 on the Internet Archive (Link).
These are not, however, the poems to remember her by. They remind me a little of the Red flag-waving poems that Genevieve Taggard wrote during her New Masses phase. You do have to give credit for hanging in with her causes, though. Rounding the corner on seventy, she still managed to feel the fire of comradeship with the Flower Power generation: “We march and sing and demonstrate./We are the rebels who extol/the equal rights that cry for peace,/the liberty which keeps man whole” (from “Hippy Song”).
Instead, if there is anything to be remembered from The Mirrored Walls, it is Mullins’ poems that deal with the personal, not the social, the intimate and not the public:
My Mother’s Final Gesture
Before she left, my mother, trying to make it easier for us, by slow degrees erased her identity. Shedding the meretricious ornamentations, the perpetual hopes, the outworn new beginnings, she covered with the tenuity of old age her beauty, grace, the poor remains of a gaiety hoarded against a need that might arise. So intent was she on divesting herself of all familiar lineaments, she did no heed a word of what we were saying: that we were glad she soon would be released from the tremors of our menaced civilization, the fears and horrors seeping through our walls. Barely recognizable at the end, except to us who knew her as she was, she slipped away with a reassuring flutter of her hands. We watched her go toward her unknown destination, then turned to face our own.
Dynamic of Life
Everything changes, everything passes away, And I lift my hands and hold them in front of my face. The joys impatient to leave me I try to delay, None of them pause, outlast my clumsy embrace.
New flowers bloom and new songs come into fashion, The hair of my love is black and then it is gold. I shrink from the touch of an unfamiliar passion, I reject the strange and new, I cling to the old.
Everything changes, everything passes away, Nothing will heed me, nothing remain in its place. The warmth I will need tomorrow goes from me today, And I lift my hands and hold them in front of my face.
I wouldn’t say that any of what I read in this neglected collection were great poems. But as someone about a block away from rounding the corner on sixty, whose mother is going gently into that good night, I will say that these two were tough to read without feeling a chill down my spine.
The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems, 1929-1969, by Helene Mullins New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970
Attempt what’s perpendicular. Scale what’s impossible. Try the knife edge between two voids; look into both abysses. Bring back some word of wordlessness if strength enough is in you. Write doggedly of dizzying things; with small implacable digits Delimit space to fit the brain, that it may bulk and be.
No one but you can help us much. Subdue what blasts. Dare do it. Ride formlessness, word wordlessness. Be not aghast. Be poet.
fromCollected Poems, by Abbie Huston Evans Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970
Abbie Huston Evans, around 1961Asked to name that book published in the last quarter of a century that she believed to have been the most undeservedly neglected for an American Scholar feature on “Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years,”, Louise Bogan, in one of her last letters, nominated “the poetry of Abbie Huston Evans.” Chances are few of The American Scholar’s readers recognized Evan’s name. Chances are even fewer of today’s readers would.
And chances are that Evans would have taken this in stride. Few poets have had her capacity for patience and her ability to see things from the long view.
When an eye ailment required a series of surgeries that forced her to postpone entering Radcliffe College for six years, she waited, spending endless days walking along the coast near her home in Camden, Maine. Over thirty when she graduated, she still took on the challenges of a younger woman, traveling to France to work with the Red Cross during World War One and returning to the States to work in social relief for miners in Colorado and steelworkers in Pittsburgh. By the time she joined the faculty of the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, she was forty-one; she taught there for the next thirty years.
With a little help from Edna St. Vincent Millay, who’d been one of Evans’ Sunday school students in Camden, Harpers agreed to publish her first collection of poems, Outcrop, in 1928. Evans was 47. “Read these poems too swiftly, or only once, and your heart may still be free of them. Read them again, with care, and they will lay their hands upon you.” Evans herself acknowledged that she favored things that required long study. “For some twisted reason I/Love what many men pass by,” begins one of her early poems, “Juniper.”
She could write of “The Mountains” that “they are at best but a short-lived generation,/Such as stars must laugh at as they journey forth.” Looking at the stones in “The Stone-Wall,” she could see that, having been dug up from the earth, they were “Back to darkness sinking/At a pace too slow/for man’s eyes to mark, less/Swift than shells grow.” No wonder that when Richard Wilbur presented Evans with the Russell Loines Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1961, he said that “her subject is nature, and it is not a nature bordered by candytuft. It is ancient, vast, mysterious, and catastrophic; it includes the polar ice-caps and ‘knittings and couplings’ of the atoms.”
Some of this tendency she owed to her father, a Welshman who emigrated to the U. S. as a young man, and who worked for years to be able to put himself through college and theological seminary, becoming a Congregational minister in his thirties. Evans was proud of her father and commemorated him in “Welsh Blood,” a poem written in her seventies.
Here my own father Worked in the coal seam Out of light of day, Going in by starlight, Coming out by starlight, First, a child of seven. Last, a man of twenty, Throwing down the coal pick, Crossed the ocean, Found my mother, Begot me.
Evans’ second collection, The Bright North (1938) gained little recognition when it was published in 1938, but a few other poets cherished a number of poems from the collection. Louise Bogan liked to include Evans’ “To a Forgotten Dutch Painter” in her readings, perhaps because it celebrated the same attention to fine details that was integral to Bogan’s own style:
You are a poet, for you love the thing Itself. In twenty ways you make me know You dote on difference little as that which sets Berry apart from berry in the handful.
It was not until she was nearly eighty, however, that she won the Loines Award and her third collection, Fact of Crystal, was selected as winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. A slender book of just thirty-seven poems, it had taken her over twenty years to write. “Words have to ripen for me,” she once explained, and she was satisfied that two or three poems a year was a perfectly respectable rate of production.
If anything, Evans felt that haste was antithetical to good poetry. In “The Bridgehead Generation,” she cautioned her colleagues,
We are too near. In the face of what we see Silence is better than the sound of words. Homer himself sang not till Trojan swords Were long since rust in an old century.
Not till the tumult dies, and under green Lie all of us, and time has brought to birth Poets whose frame-dust slumbers deep in earth Can men make song of what our eyes have seen.
And yet she remained very much aware of the changes taking place around her. She took part in a “Poets for Peace” reading in New York City in 1967, alongside Wilbur, Arthur Miller, and Robert Lowell. When the University of Pittsburgh published her Collected Poems in 1970 as part of its Pitt Poetry Series (which is full of fine volumes of unjustly neglected poetry), it included five new poems Evans had written within the last two years. Among them was “Martian Landscape,” inspired by the signals sent back to Earth by Mariner 4 and Mars 3 spacecraft. In it, she demonstrated an understanding both of the nature of digital communication and the possibilities of finding poetry at the cutting edge of technology:
I think of the Martian landscape late delivered To the eye of man by digits of a code Reporting shades of grayness, darker, lighter, In dull procession; in the end disclosing To the rapt eye the unimagined craters.
— And I see a poem, word by word assembled In markings down a page flash into code, And bring in sightings of another landscape No eye has seen before.
When Evans died at the age of 101 in 1983, no major newspaper noted her passing. Her friend, Margaret Shea, wrote of her interment, “I didn’t expect trumpets and a Bach chorale, but I had hoped for some better farewell to a great poet. One spray of flowers lay on the astro-turf; on a small disposable table behind the flowers stood a box containing her ashes…. What a ceremony for such a lively, gallant lady.”
Evans was a great lover of music. She had season tickets to the Philadelphia for decades, and sometimes quipped that half of the musicians in the Orchestra had been in one or other of her classes at the Settlement Music School. And so I want to close by reprinting a lovely and funny tribute to music from Fact of Crystal:
All Those Hymnings-up to God
All those hymnings-up to God of Bach and Cesar Franck Cannot have been lost utterly, been arrows that went wide. Like homing birds loosed from the hand, beating up through land fog, Have they not circled up above, poised, and found out direction (The old God gone, the new not yet, but back of all I AM)?
Such cryings-up confound us; I think they are not tangential, But aimed at a center; I think that the through-road will follow their blaze. No man has handled God, but these men have come nearest. I trust them more than the foot rule. Bach may yet have been right.
Bernice Kenyon published just three collections of her poetry, the last over thirty years before she died. And perhaps this is because her preference for simple, concise words and phrases reached the point at which writing itself became impossible. Even in her twenties, one critic remarked that “Miss Kenyon is an artist who loves to chisel at her material until she achieve perfection.” Whatever the real reason, her work is largely forgotten now, and while I wouldn’t argue that she deserves recognition as one the greatest American poets of her time, I do find her last collection, Night Sky (1951) a quiet, humble, and moving set of meditations upon our place in the universe. Take the lines that open the book:
Night Sky
Let me lift up my glance to the night sky — More strange than mystery, more clear and plain Than treasured truth; so shall I hope and try Unceasingly, and even if in vain, To know, though I can never indeed define, The infinite way, its symbol, and its sign.
This is a far cry from the confident tone of Kenyon’s earliest poems, collected in Songs of Unrest: 1920-1922 (1923):
Security
On old interminable strife, On deep unrest, we build secure; And who shall find for any life Foundations yet more sure?
For want of basic certainty The little structure of these days Would go unbuilt. But wiser we: Our tower rocks and sways
And mocks the assaulting elements With slender strength and fragile form. And we can laugh if its defense Comes clattering down in storm.
Kenyon began working as a story editor at Scribner‘s magazine soon after graduating from Wellesley, and, in 1927, moved over to the magazine’s publishing house, Charles Scribner’s Sons, where she worked as an assistant to legendary editor Maxwell Perkins throughout most of Perkins’ time with the firm. Her husband, Walter Gilkyson, was nearly twenty years her elder, and the couple enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle that sometimes earned the jealousy of other writers and artists with whom they socialized. In one of her letters to Theodore Roethke, Louise Bogan wrote, “you should see her: she closely resembles a Swedish cook and she wears false furs (meow, meow) in profusion….”
I suspect, in fact, that Kenyon’s poem, “Smiling Woman,” may have been a veiled portrait of Bogan, who often wore a Mona Lisa-like sardonic smile in her photographs:
Smiling Woman
Her personable countenance Incites the mind devoid of laughter; She is a smooth and supple lance That, bent, retained some bending after.
Always the sun will flash from it, Tracing that length that never broke — Her lovely grace — her singing wite That cuts a curved and cruel stroke.
The title of Songs of Unrest is unfortunate and misleading. Kenyon’s work was not the least bit radical or revolutionary, and whatever unrest she intended to convey was purely personal and psychological.
The centerpiece of her second collection, Meridian: Poems 1923-1932 (1933), is a sequence titled, “Sonnets in Protest,” but the protest has nothing to do with the political or economic conditions of her time. Instead, these are the replies of a lady “to the Poet who wishes to immortalize her in his verses”:
Write if you will, in each enduring phrase, Of her whose cruelty has brought you sorrow; But when the past devours a thousand days, And you count treasure fr the hundred morrows, You will be baffled with a wordless rage To find your captive vanished from your cage.
I find Meridian: Poems 1923-1932 an uneasy mix of anger, love of nature, and the occasionally whimsical (e.g., two poems about cats). Her comments upon the crowd in “Sonnets Written in the Pennsylvania Station” seem almost snippy with superiority: “They do not live. There is not one is warm./There is not one who cares to give or yield/An atom’s breath.” In the hands of someone like Philip Larkin, such nastiness can sometimes rise to the level of art. But not here.
Night Sky is, by far, her best collection and perhaps the only one fully worth rediscovering. Night Sky collects around fifty poems, organized into four sections: “Of the Green Earth”; “Of Human Kind”; “Of One Love”; and “Of Several Destinies.” A rough arc is traced through this progression, from the specific and mundane to the vast and infinite. In “Sigrid’s Song” in the first section, Kenyon rejoices in the vocabulary of wildflowers (“Fire-weed, saxifrage, bee-balm and feverfew”) but recognizes that what endures is their timeless beauty: “Nothing lasts as flowers last, with simple form and savour;/Nothing shines as flowers shine, although their time be brief.”
Impermanence continues as a theme in “Of Human Kind,” with lines like “Thus are my walls gone down, and the tower crumbled./These I had hoped would last forever and longer” and “Of One Love” (“The stars have given no pledge that we should be/Forever happy as we are today”). As Gerard Previn Meyer wrote in Saturday Review, “Deeply introverted, tranquilly unified in theme, these poems express the poet’s search through time toward timelessness, through the finite toward the infinite.” In the final section, “Of Several Destinies,” each poem is a variation upon a single theme, that of acceptance of our limitations, our inability to fully grasp the vastness of time and space in which our life is just a blink:
For Silence
Since there is not, for you and me, One instant of tranquility, But always beating in the throat Such clamor and such high confusion — Let us preserve the mind remote, And build our silence of illusion.
Think for a little of those shining Worlds where no man has set his foot: Where dark and daylight have no meaning — Only as distance; where no root Of deep disaster strikes and holds; Where only wonderment unfolds.
Then you will find, most certainly, That all you sought was fantasy. The stream of life runs loud and wide, Bearing us toward infinity. How shall we learn to know — to ride The noise of this our destiny? Here rest a moment — rest you here, Where your own thoughts are still and clear.
From an artistic standpoint, I can see weaknesses in Kenyon’s poetry. Her choice of words may, at times, be too simple, her statements too direct, to stand up under sustained study. And perhaps this is why, although she continued to write, she published no other collection before her death at 84. Her New York Times obituary suggested that she was in the process of compiling a fourth book, “Mortal Music,” when she died, but there is no evidence that she was working with any publisher. It’s a shame to have lost her best poems (such as “Never,” reprinted here last year), however, as they achieve a level of peace and understanding that is almost like a prayer. I have a feeling that Night Sky will have a lasting place in my nightstand, as a book I can reach for again and again to settle the day’s madness.
We sit by stone and ivy leaves For flute and oboe’s disquisition; The evening, after heat, receives This gentle Middle West rendition.
The foursquare walls of courtyard cup Two funnels at their intersection, The music running down and up On lukewarm currents of convection,
So that the twin parabola Of clarinettists’ conversation May tunnel for mandragora Or plummet to a constellation.
The body may be earthed or skied, But mind, extrinsic to seduction, Spreads out into a thin glass slide, Incising music’s cones of suction.
Leave those twinkling points to pair With ground bass in a Bach Invention Cry me not up to meet them there — I balance on my disc of air — In a glass darkly I shall stare At inklings of a fourth dimension.
fromPoems, 1947-1961, by Elizabeth Sewell Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962
Negative Entropy or The Third Law of Thermodynamics or How It is We Keep Alive
We feed on crystals, feast on minerals, Batten, upon the moon, consume the stars And through the channels of our love drain off The sun’s heat and the whole world’s energy.
The crocus and the oak, the elephant, The long-tailed tit, the taxidermist’s owl, Our eyes, our hair, our nails, all, all the same Millions of indistinguishable atoms Chaos in single numbers, order in milliards.
Only the passionate indestructible pattern Of the all-but-eternal molecule, carries the key. Locked in its heart lies the secret To grow from the acorn the oak, From the corm the year’s yellow crocus, From the fertilised cell the elephant, From the egg the tit or the owl, From eyes our children’s eyes, from hair their hair And from our nails their same peculiar nails.
Each greedy of life resists death, Sucks sustenance from the desert; Devours the rock and the ruby. Until we cool to our end And dying provide new fires For love and fresh generation.
from The Lightning Struck Tower, by Sheila Shannon London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1947
I will not come today– I cannot come tomorrow. I am gone far away Beyond the realm of sorrow; Beyond the reach of sleep, And past the firmament I am gone. No word is sent. I am submerged, sunk deep In the black basalt of eternity. So call no name–you will call hopelessly. But let the turning sky be fair and blue, With what I loved the most: the eternal hue Of hope and wonder, that is always you.
fromNight Sky, by Bernice Kenyon New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951
In memory of Bill Andrews, August 29, 1955 – October 3, 2014
When you go away Then I enter your room, And suddenly A faint and lingering scent Of cigarettes Stabs me, Like the perfume of bruised violets In the quiet gloom Of twilight, and I begin to look Around me and I see A book That is open on its face In the place Where you laid it. And I find ashes still scattered on the floor. And my heart beats faster when I remember That before you left I loved to kneel and brush them out of the way. Because I knew that you had spilled them And would spill more. . . . And then I look into the mirror until it seems As empty as a house of dreams. Or the white-pillowed bed where recently you lay, And I shut the door Quietly — And go away.
from David and Bath-sheba, and other poems, by Sally Kinsolving Baltimore: The Norman, Remington Company, 1922
The pear is weighted now with more than fruit– In hordes they come, a winged avalanche, Descending on the tree from tip to root, Shaking the leaves, bending each silver branch. They overflow the meadows for miles around In multitudes, spilling their liquid song; This is the time of swallows; along the ground, On fence posts, bushes, these living beads are strung. And then, in thousands, they reclaim the sky, Sailing across the soft blue sea of air, A bright, light-winged armada; we watch them fly To what far destination; suddenly aware Of the year’s waning, as the quick eye follows The end of summer in the flight of swallows.
from In Time of Swallows: 52 American Birds, by Mae Winkler Goodman, illustrated by William E. Scheele New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1951
Every waiting moment is a fold of sorrow Pierced within the heart. Pieces of mind get torn off emotionally In large wisps.
Like a waif I lie, stillbound to action: Each waiting hour I stare and see not, Hum and hear not, nor care I how long The lode mood lasts.
My eyes are raw and wide apart Stiffened by the salt bar That separates us.
You so far; I at ease at the hearth Glowing for a welcome From your heart.
Each beating moment crosses my dream So that wise things cannot pass As we had planned.
Woe for all of us : supporting those Who like us fail to steel their hearts, But keep them wound in clocktight rooms, Ill found. Unused. Obsessed by time.
Each beating hour Rings false.
from The New British Poets: An Anthology, edited by Kenneth Rexroth New York City: New Directions, 1948
In the eyes of some critics, Taggard has only herself to blame. Somewhere in the early 1930s, Taggard decided that her work was simply not confronting the traumatic social conditions she saw around her. She “refused to write out of a decorative impulse because I conceive it to be the dead end of much feminine talent.” Instead, she chose to write what she considered “poetry that relates to general experience and the realities of the time.” Although she gives Taggard prominent mention in her landmark survey, A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, Elaine Showalter concludes that the poet’s choice to reject her early lyrical style in favor of a more politically-oriented realism “stifled the ardent feminine voice that had made her poetry alive.”
The fact that her second husband, Kenneth Durant, was the American agent of the Soviet news agency, Tass, and that her poems regularly featured in New Masses, colored the opinion of even her closest friends. In an interview for an oral history project, Sara Bard Field claimed, “She wrote a poem called something like ‘Our Good Father Stalin.'” (Bard may have been recalling Taggard’s 1942 poem, “Salute to the Russian Dead,” which includes such propagandistic declarations as, “Whatever is good and tangible and fair in time to come/Begins here, where they die in their blood, in their genius.”) Certainly, Taggard’s tendency to reach for the red banner and to wave it a little too enthusiastically after her marriage to Durant is difficult to look past, particularly after The Gulag Archipelago and the declassification of the Venona intercepts.
Yet it’s worth taking the effort to look past Taggard’s most strident verses and discover more about this woman and her work. And a great deal can be understood by a series of autobiographical pieces she wrote for various magazines between 1924 and 1934. The last of these, titled “Hawaii, Washington, Vermont,” appeared in the October 1934 issue of Scribners magazine, and contrasts the two extremes of her childhood: the bleak, narrow-minded aridity of Waitland, a small town in the farmlands of Eastern Washington; and the lush, gentle warmth of rural Oahu, Hawaii.
Taggard was born in Waitland, where her father had come at the invitation of his brother, a successful apple farmer, in hopes of improving his always-fragile health. The dust of farmland life, however, was ruinous, however, and in 1897, when Genevieve was two, he accepted an offer from the Disciples of Christ to run a missionary school on Oahu. They lived there for over ten years, then returned to Waitland, came back briefly, then left Hawaii for good, settling back in Waitland, where Genevieve graduated from high school in 1912.
For Taggard, Hawaii was, literally, “our Garden of Eden.” They lived with the diverse cultures of the island–“the Portuguese, the Filipinos, the Puerto Ricans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hawaiian-Chinese, and the hap-a-haoles.” They ate mangos, scooped minnows by the hundreds from coastal lagoons, picked algarroba beans, and played in the warm Pacific surf. Having to return to Waitland was like being cast out of Paradise. In an article titled, “A Haole Scrapbook,” published in the June 1924 issue of The Bookman, Taggard recalled one of her last days before leaving:
John Frank, the greatest swimmer of all the native lads, stood on the big rock that overhung the Kalihi-kai swimming pool, the last day I saw him. His fathers had fished there, with spears and torches. The fish, white and languid, went back and forth, that day, in a shaft of sunlight that knifed the yellow-green water. John Frank stood on the stone worn into a little hollow by the feet of his forefathers. He didn’t own the stone. It was on a white man’s estate now.
“Wellakahou”, shouted John Frank, and cut the water with his joined palms.
I sat on the stone when he left it and strung myself a lei–it was a goodbye lei made of ilima flowers. The first span of my years–the first ten years spent in the islands–was ending the next day.
John Frank’s smooth black head popped up from the water. “How long you going stay in the States?” he asked me, as if it had just become clear that I was really going,
“Three months”, I said.
“Mangoes getting ripe soon”, he offered.
A sudden pang at the thought of missing mango season went through me. John Frank had dived again. The water was sooty black and quiet. Then in a whirlpool came a brown arm. This time he popped up with a well formed idea: “Too bad you gotta be haole”, he said, and went under again.
Off and on, I have thought so too, all my life.
Waitland, on the other hand, seemed something very like Hell:
Hot stubble faces met us at the train window. I ducked down and took a quick look at the hot face of the town, with the feeling of a person about to enter a jail. Dust, ankle-deep, paved the main street. Broken wooden sidewalks bordered by dusty weeds led to a block of ramshackle stores. A drooping horse and a spring wagon stood hitched in front of the post office. No trees in sight; just stubble-covered hills through which we had come for hours. We children found even the first day in the new home town as dull as ditch, or rather dish, water. Houses had the blinds down to protect carpets. Houses were tight and smelled of dust. Kitchens were hot with wood stoves. Parlors were not to sit in. Flies swarmed around doorways. Outside there was stubble or dust, no grass. Children must not play in the orchards. If little girls were bored they could hem dish towels or swat flies.
James Taggard, Genevieve’s father, was given a miserable plot of land between two railroad lines and planted with a withering stand of pear trees. His brother, who had gotten his start with $2,000 borrowed from James, told him the orchard was repayment and just needed “intensive farming.” Instead, it failed, as did James’ already-poor health, and when Genevieve was accepted into the University of California Berkeley in 1914, the whole family moved with her.
Her mother ran a boarding house and Genevieve worked when she wasn’t taking classes. It took her five years to graduate, after which she parted from her family and moved to Greenwich Village. She quickly landed a job with a literary magazine, then another, then founded Measure, a Journal of Verse of which she worked as editor, and also worked as poetry editor of the Liberator, the slightly toned-down version of the Masses set up by Max Eastman. Her university classmate, Josephine Herbst, joined her, and the two were soon best friends. Taggard helped arranged for Herbst’s abortion after she became pregnant during her affair with Maxwell Anderson. The two complained about the character of the men they met: “What’s in the men nowadays–the women have the fire & the ardency & the power & the depth?,” Taggard once wrote Herbst.
Then she met Robert Wolf, who styled himself the model of the serious artist: “He had an extremely high idea of his own value as a poet,” recalled Sara Bard Fields. Taggard fell for him, hard, and they soon married. In an anonymous piece, “Poet out of Pioneer,” published in the Nation in 1927, it’s clear she was still convinced that Wolf’s art was the great cause for which she had to sacrifice: “I think I have not been as wasted as my mother was…. My chief improvement on her past was the man I chose to marry….. I married a poet and novelist, gifted and difficult….”
She gradually discovered just how difficult Wolf could be. He insisted he had to go off on his own to write, that she was too intrusive and confining for him to be able to create around her. After Genevieve gave birth to their daughter, Marcia, in 1921, he said she would have to take full responsibility for raising the child. They moved back to California and Genevieve went to work at Mills College while Wolf went off to the Pacific coast to write. Soon, instead of looking on her marriage as her “chief improvement,” she was writing Herbst that it was hard to sacrifice herself for his art “when you struggle for weeks with stoves and mud and diapers and canned food….”
Though they did not finally divorce until 1934, Wolf and Taggard spent less and less time together. He became subject to bouts of depression, bouts of hyperactivity, and bouts of anger, most of it directed at Genevieve. She continued to be the main bread-winner, working as a book reviewer, teaching at Bennington College, and still managing to write far more than Wolf did. Her first book, For Eager Lovers, was published in 1922. In it, in a poem titled, “Married,” the refrain tells us much of the state of her own marriage: “Apart, apart, we are apart.” The book included a poem that demonstrated just how much her initial idealism had given way to a much more measured view of the world:
Everyday Alchemy
Men go to women mutely for their peace; And they, who lack it most, create it when They make because they must, loving their men– A solace for sad bosom-bended heads. There Is all the meager peace men get no otherwhere; No mountain space, no tree with placid leaves, Or heavy gloom beneath a young girl’s hair, No sound of valley bell on autumn air, Or room made home with doves along the eves, Ever holds peace like this, poured by poor women Out of their heart’s poverty, for worn men.
Her second book, a small volume titled, Hawaiian Hilltop, was published in 1924. In 1925, Eastman asked her to edit May Days: An Anthology of Verse from Masses-Liberator. In her preface, she remarks that re-reading the back issues of the magazines “had the same fascination that the face of your father at the age of sixteen has, when you come upon it peering from an album, for the first time after years of pre-occupation with your own generation.”
Her third book, Words for the Chisel, was published by Knopf in 1926, but it was Travelling Standing Still (1928) that first earned her serious critical acclaim. Edmund Wilson called Taggard “a poet of our common human experience” and lauded her poem, “With Child,” as the best poem about birth he’d read. William Rose Benet, writing in the Saturday Review, said he found it “almost impossible to classify Miss Taggard as a poet. If you use the image of a gem, she has many facets, and she has always possessed a quality like the moods of water.”
Though she no longer considered her marriage a triumph, she still saw herself as something of a rebel against the conventions of her parents. In a piece titled, “Statements of Belief,” published in The Bookman, Taggard described how her inclination toward contrarianism started early:
We always sang four-part songs, in the Islands, at school and singing was important. I sat with the altos and sang the dark humming parts. After about a year, came along a singing teacher who applied her octaves and diagnosed: “But you are a soprano.”
There it was again. I was a freckled blonde when I wanted to be brunette, white when I wanted to be Hawaiian, and a soprano when I wanted to be alto.
“I’m going to keep on singing alto.” That was final.
“Very well, and ruin your voice. You have a real soprano. And you might sing solos.”
And so, Alto against Nature, with now (she was right), no voice at all . . . and the only chance for singing, on paper. Uncomfortable as a dog within ear-shot of high sopranos, still liking best middle register and counterpoint.
And so, Alto against Nature, she proclaimed herself quite the opposite of all that her parents stood for: “I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial.”
The late 1920s and early 1930s was perhaps the period of Taggard’s best work. Benet later selected a poem Taggard published in the 13 October 1928 issue of Saturday Review for his anthology, Fifty Poets (1933). The poem offers hints of the two worlds of her childhood:
Try Tropic for Your Balm (On the Properties of Nature for Healing an Illness)
Try tropic for your balm. Try storm. And after storm, calm. Try snow of heaven, heavy, soft, and slow, Brilliant and warm. Nothing will help, and nothing do much harm.
Drink iron from rare springs; follow the sun; Go far To get the beam of some medicinal star; Or in your anguish run The gauntlet of all zones to an ultimate one. Fever and chill Punish you still, Earth has no zone to work against your will.
Burn in the jewelled desert with the toad. Catch lace In evening mist across your haunted face; Or walk in upper air the slanted road. It will not lift that load; Nor will large seas undo your subtle ill.
Nothing can cure and nothing kill What ails your eyes, what cuts your pulse in two. And not kill you.
Taggard later wrote that, “One Summer evening in 1928 in a special key of loneliness and intensity and certainty, the whole thing came as if dictated…. When I wrote it … I had myself and you, reader, in mind … and many others … all of us, and there are many now–who run through books and landscapes looking for something, with worn faces. I chose this poem because it is about our life and our way of behaving.”
She joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College and began work on a biography, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, which was published in 1930. In 1931, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Europe, where she spent several months living on the island of Mallorca.
When she returned to the United States, she appears to have brought back a conviction that she had to make a fundamental change in her poetry. She felt her previous work was frivolous, and she now wrote with a thumping seriousness worthy of Robert Wolf:
To the Powers of Desolation
O mortal boy, we cannot stop The leak in that great wall where death seeps in With hands or bodies, frantic mouths, or sleep. Over the wall, over the wall’s top I have seen rising waters, waters of desolation.
From my despair bibles are written, children begotten; Women open the wrong doors; men lie in ditches retching,– The horrible bright eyes of insanity fix on a blue fly, Focus, enlarge. Dear mortal, escape You cannot. I hear the drip of eternity above the quiet buzz of your sleep….
Genevieve Taggard in the 1940s while on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence In a review of a collection of poems by William Carlos Williams written for New Masses at around the same time, Taggard bemoaned that Williams had “fallen among the Imagists” and declared that, “We do not need to pay such exaggerated attention to ‘real objects’ because now the fog clears off; real ideas challenge us.”
Divorced from Wolf in 1934, she joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, where she remained until forced by ill health (chronic hypertension) to leave in 1946. Through her work for New Masses, she met Kenneth Durant and they married in 1935. By all reports, the two were deeply in love. She became a member of the Communist Party and they took a tour of the Soviet Union in 1936. She published a selection of her new, realistic poems, Calling Western Union, soon after, and two years later, Collected Poems: 1918-1938, in which she formally declared her lyrical work a thing of the past.
Interestingly, her shift from modernism to realism was mirrored by a renewed respect for the values her parents–and, in particular, her mother, stood for. In the November 1938 issue of Poetry, she published the following:
To My Mother
The long delight and early I heard in my small years clearly: The morning song, bed-making, bustle for new undertaking, With dish-washing and hay-raking,
This vanished, or seemed diminished, Was lost, in trouble finished. I did nervous work, unsteady, captive work and heady. Nothing well-done and ready.
And heard in other places Than home, and from foreign faces The dauntless gay and breezy communal song of the bust, I–idle and uneasy.
I said, my work is silly, Lonely and willy-nilly. See this hand with nicotined habits, this useless hand that edit A chronicle of debits.
Join, if I can, the makers, And the tillers of difficult acres; And get somehow this dearly lost, this re-discovered rarely Habit of rising early.
She had apparently also forgiven her mother for keeping a volume of Edgar Guest’s poems next to Genevieve’s books on her nightstand. During the Forties, Taggard spent a good deal of her free time at a farm near Bennington that she had bought with the profits from her Dickinson book. Although she acknowledged she could never fully assimilate with the locals, the rural atmosphere somehow brought back her memories of Hawaii, and a lyrical strain began to force its way back into her poetry. She published A Part of Vermont in 1945–a slender book but with nary a sign of red banners or marching masses.
A year later, she published Slow Music, which showed a writer torn between the cause she believed in and the sensuality at the core of her spirit. Dross like “Salute to the Russian Dead” is overwhelmed by such poems as “Hymn to Yellow,” “A Dialogue on Cider,” “A Poem to Explain Everything About a Certain Day in Vermont,” and the playful “A Sombrero Is a Kind of Hat This Poem Is a Kind of Nonsense.” And the woman who rejected William Carlos Williams for fixating on objects came up with a lovely little poem with echoes of William’s red wheel barrow:
The Geraniums
Even if the geraniums are artificial Just the same, In the rear of the Italian cafe Under the nimbus of electric light They are red; no less red For how they were made. Above The mirror and the napkins In the little white pots … … In the semi-clean cafe Where they have good Lasagne … The red is a wonderful joy Really, and so are the people Who like and ignore it. In this place They also have good bread.
And so, with her last book, Origin: Hawaii (1947), Taggard returned to Oahu for the last time (and perhaps knew it for the first time). In her introduction to the collection, she wrote that, “A place that has not been truly felt and communicated does not, in a certain sense, exist. Just as a human being who is not quite conscious may be said not quite to exist either.” The collection includes the last poem she wrote, “Luau,” which, one could argue, offers her own equivalent of the Last Supper:
So I come home in the valley of Kalihi, My bare feet on hard earth, hibiscus with stamen-tongue Twirled in my fingers like a paper windmill, A wheel of color, crimson, the petals large, Kiss of the petal, tactile, light, intense …
Now I am back again. I can touch the children: My human race, in whom was a human dwelling, Whose names are all the races–of one skin. For so our games ran tacit, without blur.
… Here we are dipping and passing the calabash In the ceremony of friends; I also; But in frenzy and pain distort The simple need, knowing how blood is shed:
To sit together Drinking the blue ocean, eating the sun Like a fruit …
Geraldine Taggard died in New York City in 1948 at the age of 53, of the debilitating effects of long-term chronic hypertension. Though all her books are now long out of print, by far the best place to start to discover her poetry is the collection compiled by her daughter, Marcia Durant Liles, To the Natural World, which was issued in 1980 but is available for free in PDF format (link. It includes some of her very best poems and suffers none of the shortcomings of Taggard’s “realism” period.
An attractive table, round and neat. Presided over by faces sweet; Wafers and candy by fair hands passed. And I’m having my afternoon tea, at last.
Luxurious pillows, an easy chair; Odors of violets filling the air. The mingling voices of women and men. Discussing events that are and have been.
My thoughts are dreamily lifting to things More ideal than commonplace brings. When a bit of gossip commands my ear. Wafted from someone to someone near.
Touching lightly a woman’s name; Adding a thoughtless word of blame. Oh, why could they not let that scandal rest. Who welcomed her once as an honored guest?
My illusion is ended; no longer the light Of the sweet-scented room is delicious and bright; For gossip, that poison, has sifted, I see. To the very dregs of the afternoon tea.
from Some Poems, by Clara Louise Lawrence Carlton, Pennsylvania: Publisher unknown, 1914
Girl, I am tired of blowing hot and cold; Of being that with that, and this with this; A loosened leaf no bough would ever miss, At the wind’s whim betwixt the sky and mould. Of wearing masks. Oh, I would rend them all Into the dust that by my door is blown; Of my old secret bare me to the bone. Myself at last, none other! I would call:—— “I had a lover once. This is the face He lauded April-high and April-deep, As fair a flower as hers of Camelot; And yet he loved it but an April’s space. This is myself indeed. Now hear me weep. I had a lover once, but he forgot.”
from Spicewood, by Lizette Woodworth Reese Baltimore : Norman, Remington Company, 1920
Small towns Crawling out of their green shirts … Tubercular towns Coughing a little in the dawn … And the church … There is always a church With its natty spire And the vestibule– That’s where they whisper: Tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz . . . How many codes for a wireless whisper And corn flatter than it should be And those chits of leaves Gadding with every wind? Small towns From Connecticut to Maine: Tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz. .
from Sun-Up and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920
I wanted you to come to-day — Or so I told you in my letter — And yet, if you had stayed away, I should have liked you so much better. I should have sipped my tea unseen, And thrilled at every door-bell’s pealing, And thought how nice I could have been Had you evinced a little feeling.
I should have guessed you drinking tea With someone whom you loved to madness; I should have thought you cold to me, And reveled in a depth of sadness. But, no! you came without delay I could not feel myself neglected: You said the things you always say, In ways not wholly unexpected.
If you had let me wait in vain, We should, in my imagination, Have held, what we did not attain, A most dramatic conversation. Had you not come, I should have known At least a vague anticipation, Instead of which, I grieve to own, You did not give me one sensation.
from Poems, by Alice and Caroline Duer New York: George H. Richmond & Co., 1896
Alice Duer married Henry Wise Miller a few years after publishing this book of poems with her sister Caroline, and became Alice Duer Miller, who wrote “Forsaking All Others,” a verse short novel featured here recently (post).
This is one in a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.
The man body jumbled out of the earth, half, formed, Clay on the feet. Heavy with the lingering might of chaos. The man face so high above the feet As if lonesome for them like a child. The veins that beat heavily with the music they but half understood Coil languidly around the heart And lave it in the death stream Of a grand impersonal benignance.
from Precipitations, by Evelyn Scott New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920
I could hardly imagine a less likely subject for a poem than Theodore Dreiser, but this sketch by Evelyn Scott is close to perfection, both in its imagery and in the clay-footedness of that last line, which might have come straight off the pages of one of Dreiser’s novels.
The Golden Gate (1986), Vikram Seth’s novel in verse (to be precise, in Onegin stanzas) is one of my all-time favorite books, and there is something about a verse novel I find particularly attractive. Perhaps it’s the way the flow of the verse gives the narrative an added momentum. When I picked up Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes from My Country in the Istanbul airport a couple of years ago, it read so fast that I felt like I was inhaling it.
Alice Duer Miller’sForsaking All Others (1931) was probably the most successful verse novel in English since Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh or her husband Robert’s The Ring and the Book, and it got a second wind when Miller’s second verse novel, The White Cliffs, a salute to England’s defense against the Nazis, sold over a million copies and led to its reissue. Running just under 100 pages in its original hardback edition, it’s perhaps more accurate to call it a novella in verse.
Unlike Vikram Seth, Miller mostly stuck to simple rhyming couplets and alternating rhymes (ABAB), and used a variety of foot lengths rather than sticking to one particular metre. However, the first couple parts of the poem may remember readers of the light, sophisticated, ever-so-slightly tongue-in cheek tone of much of the romance between Seth’s two protagonists. In this case, there is the added spice that the lovers are married–to other people. Lee Kent’s husband is locked away in an asylum, apparently a victim of combat fatigue from his time on the Western Front. Millionaire Jim Wayne (no relation to Bruce) has married his childhood sweetheart, the faithful but somewhat dreary Ruth.
The story in Forsaking All Others is played out in five parts. Part 1: Lee and Wayne meet at a dinner party and exchange some flirtatious banter. Part 2: Interested by Wayne, Lee wonders why he doesn’t contact her until they meet again at a art auction. Part 3: Lunches ensue. Part 4: The affair develops, and Wayne starts using the demands of business as an excuse to avoid joining Ruth at their summer place in Maine.
With Part 5, however, Miller takes her story on an express train from the Jazz Age to the heart of the Victorian era. Ruth, who knows that something is going on, dies tragically from a dramatically-convenient illness. “Is that you, Jim?” she murmurs in her fever before dying in a scene worthy of “Ten Nights in a Bar-room.” Stricken with grief and remorse, Wayne sails for the Mediterranean. The moral of the story? Vide the Seventh Commandment.
Personally, I’d have been happy to stop at the end of Part 4. Wayne is already struggling between attraction to Lee and loyalty to Ruth, but there are still plenty of bubbles in this champagne:
They would meet for luncheon every day At a small unknown French cafe Half-way up town and half-way down With a chef deserving great renown. And Pierre the waiter would smile and say: “Bonjour, Monsieur, dame,” and they Would see by his smile discreet and sly That he knew exactly the reason why A couple so proud and rich should come To eat each day in a squalid slum. And nothing delighted his Gallic heart More than to find he could play a part And protect “ces amoureux foux d’ amour” And guide their choice through the carte du jour.
In its way, it could have been more conventional version of W. M. Spackman’s little classic of civilized adultery, An Armful of Warm Girl.
(1951) a quiet, humble, and moving set of meditations upon our place in the universe. Take the lines that open the book:
(1923):
(1933), is a sequence titled, “Sonnets in Protest,” but the protest has nothing to do with the political or economic conditions of her time. Instead, these are the replies of a lady “to the Poet who wishes to immortalize her in his verses”:
; Oxford’s 
; and the Library of America’s 
. She has her 
, Elaine Showalter concludes that the poet’s choice to reject her early lyrical style in favor of a more politically-oriented realism “stifled the ardent feminine voice that had made her poetry alive.”
and the declassification of the 
, was published in 1924. In 1925, Eastman asked her to edit 
. In her preface, she remarks that re-reading the back issues of the magazines “had the same fascination that the face of your father at the age of sixteen has, when you come upon it peering from an album, for the first time after years of pre-occupation with your own generation.”
, was published by Knopf in 1926, but it was 
(1928) that first earned her serious critical acclaim. Edmund Wilson called Taggard “a poet of our common human experience” and lauded her poem, “With Child,” as the best poem about birth he’d read. William Rose Benet, writing in the Saturday Review, said he found it “almost impossible to classify Miss Taggard as a poet. If you use the image of a gem, she has many facets, and she has always possessed a quality like the moods of water.”
(1933). The poem offers hints of the two worlds of her childhood:
, which was published in 1930. In 1931, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Europe, where she spent several months living on the island of Mallorca.
, soon after, and two years later, 
, in which she formally declared her lyrical work a thing of the past.
in 1945–a slender book but with nary a sign of red banners or marching masses.
, which showed a writer torn between the cause she believed in and the sensuality at the core of her spirit. Dross like “Salute to the Russian Dead” is overwhelmed by such poems as “Hymn to Yellow,” “A Dialogue on Cider,” “A Poem to Explain Everything About a Certain Day in Vermont,” and the playful “A Sombrero Is a Kind of Hat This Poem Is a Kind of Nonsense.” And the woman who rejected William Carlos Williams for fixating on objects came up with a lovely little poem with echoes of William’s red wheel barrow:
(1947), Taggard returned to Oahu for the last time (and perhaps knew it for the first time). In her introduction to the collection, she wrote that, “A place that has not been truly felt and communicated does not, in a certain sense, exist. Just as a human being who is not quite conscious may be said not quite to exist either.” The collection includes the last poem she wrote, “Luau,” which, one could argue, offers her own equivalent of the Last Supper:
(1986), Vikram Seth’s novel in verse (to be precise, in 
(1931) was probably the most successful verse novel in English since Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 
, a salute to England’s defense against the Nazis, sold over a million copies and led to its reissue. Running just under 100 pages in its original hardback edition, it’s perhaps more accurate to call it a novella in verse.
.
, and I’ve provided a