August 15, 2013

The trip to the compatriot-honoring North Carolina Writers’ Conference cast my mind onto Ohio poets of the same ilk, and I remembered from Ohio History (7th grade) the names Alice and Phoebe Cary. Turns out they’re interesting, and Alice by no means contemptible by the light of her times. She would have been less ornate had she lived later, but it cannot be helped. I ordered Alice and Phoebe Cary’s Poems from ABE Books, and received the 1864 edition (probably printed in 1876). In it are very old photographs, clippings from newspapers, a thank you note from 1894. It was clearly a beloved and well-thumbed volume, with pages marked with yellow newspapers and specially beloved passages underlined. There seems to be a special classification of writer called “beloved”– the beloved poet James Whitcomb Riley, the beloved poet Alice Cary. Since I’ve been thinking about this, my mind has found no example of a poet who was at once “beloved” and “great.” Frost comes to mind. He may be an exception, but those to whom he is beloved have not read him very closely. Tennyson? I find him great, but for others he may veer into the beloved camp. Sister poetesses got me on to the Davidson sisters, Lucretia and Margaret, about whom I’m trying to write a play. ABE sent me Female Poets of America edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, with editions (and a snotty critique) by H. H. Stoddard. The book is quite old, though I can’t find a date, and in it is, possibly, not one single line of distinction. Mr Griswold expresses the view that there is simply no point in looking in a a female for the same genius one looks for in a male. This would be hard to disprove, using his apparently exhaustive volume for proof.  The argument– if I stated it with better care– is not idiotic, though certainly of its time, and touching on psychological differences which we would express in far different ways. You could shuffle the names of the poetesses over the poems and no one would notice, such is the sameness of vision and identity of approach. That was prized in those times, the confidence instilled by a known mark hit and ever after honored.

Quite sensational morning of painting yesterday. I am grateful for it.