Women Poets: Part Two

Phillis Wheatley

African-born Wheatley lived from 1753 to 1784. She arrived in Boston by slave ship in 1761 at the age of seven. She was purchased to serve as the personal servant to a local tailor’s wife, who recognized the young girl’s potential and allowed her to acquire an education. Wheatley’s poise and wit soon dazzled prominent colonists such as George Washington and John Handcock, and before she was twenty she published her first poem.

Moving to England with the son of her mistress, she so impressed society figures that she was able to publish a book, Poems On Various Subjects, Religious And Moral. Returning to Boston, she was eventually freed, but her influential patrons soon forgot her and she died in poverty. The only book by the first African-American poet appeared posthumously in America in 1786.

Christina Rossetti

The English-born daughter of Italian Emigrants, Christina Rossetti lived from 1830 to 1894. She was associated with a sophisticated London community of writers, political theorists and artists that included Algernon Swinburne and Edith Sitwell. She privately published her first volume of poetry when she was seventeen. She lived at home throughout her adulthood, working with various charitable causes.

Rossetti was a fervently pious Anglican, yet she conducted a series of feverish and frustrated lover affairs. This duality shows up in her poetry, which reflects both deep religious devotion and seething sensuality. Her seven volumes of verse received an enthusiastic critical response, most notably Goblin Market in 1862, The Prince’s Progress in 1866 and A Pageant in 1881.

Amy Lowell

Amy Powell lived from 1874 to 1925. The Boston family Amy Powell was born into might more accurately be called an institution. Among other distinguished members it included a president of Harvard University, a board member of MIT and the poet James Russell Lowell, who was her cousin.

Talented but troubled, Lowell was largely self-educated and went through the motions of Boston Brahmin ladyhood. Then in 1902, she attended a performance by the celebrated Italian actress Eleanora Duse that inspired her to follow her literary ambitions.

Ten years later she published a mediocre book of verse, but she did not achieve poetical distinction until she encountered Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Frost and other Imagist poets. Her Can Grande’s Castle in 1918 and Pictures of The Floating World in 1919 secured her place among the leading imagists, while Tendencies In Modern American Poetry in 1917 revealed her import as a critic. Many of her love poems were addressed to Ada Russell, her lifelong companion.

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

The Pennsylvania-born Hilda Doolittle lived between 1886 and 1972. She failed English at Bryn Mawr College and became engaged to Ezra Pound before moving to London with him and publishing her first poems in 1912. It was Pound who first dubbed her “H.D. Imagiste,” for her word-association brand of poetry, before their relationship deteriorated.

Under her initials she published her first collection, Sea Garden in 1916, whose poems voiced disgust at the manly art of war and insistence on the need for spiritual renewal. Marrying, bearing a child, divorcing, losing friends and family to war, and carrying on a variety of relationships with men and women. H.D. Published Hymen in 1921, Heliodora And Other Poems in 1924, Collected Poems in 1925 and Red Roses For Bronze in 1931.

She also wrote a number of novels and short stories, including the autobiographical HERmione in 1923. Her personal conflicts landed her on Freud’s psychoanalytic couch in 1933 and 1934, spawning the verse Tribute To Freud in 1944.

She continued to fall in and out of love, struggle with emotional problems and compose verse until her death, notably two epic poems, Trilogy in 1944 through 1946 and Helen In Egypt in 1961, both written in reaction to the horrors of World War II.