Poetry

The final poet that Ella Sterling Cummins profiles in her curious but informative 1893 review of Californian writers, The Story of the Files, is a young Italian immigrant:

Among the volumes of verse published in California none have so pathetic [i.e. emotional] a history as those written by Lorenzo Sosso. Born in Italy, young Sosso came when but a child with his parents to California, and soon forgot his native language. But the spirit of genius burned on through years of poverty and menial labor. In intervals of work poems came crowding into his brain, almost faster than he could write them. Night study brought familiarity with classic myths and the meters of the poets. His savings of years published a volume before he was twenty years of age. It contained many ideas and graceful lines, but of this edition he did not sell a copy.

Cummins goes on to describe several more of Sosso’s failed publications, and then, worst of all, his employment at the Post Office: “here he became part of the machine, and has been so busily employed that in the time that has since elapsed he has written not one word. But he has evidently been thinking, and, when a few more years have passed over his head, may speak again.”

That same year, Lorenzo Sosso married Emma Henley, and by 1895 they two children, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he took a job in “the machine” to support his family. As Cummins surmised, Sosso had indeed been thinking, though it took a decade to achieve results. in 1902 Elder & Shepard published Sosso’s In the Realms of Gold, a 171-page volume containing 114 poems written between 1891 and 1901. The dedication, to his wife Emma, would touch the heart of any romantic:

To her whose faith is still secure
Through all incertitudes of life,
The many days of joy, the few
Joyless, since she is joy thereof;
To her, the purest of the pure,
To her, the truest of the true,
The mother wedded in the wife,
I dedicate this book with love.

Paul Elder published a fair amount of original literature and poetry, but almost all of it was of poor quality, and Sosso is no exception: his verses are not memorable. There are some sparks that exhort the reader to a greater good, such as in his poem “The Socialist”:

While I hear the wailing
Of the wronged and weak
Sadly unavailing
Are the words you speak:
Where there is oppression
Manhood must resist;
Therefore this confession—
I’m a Socialist!

…

Every back we lighten
Of its burdens sore,
Every home we brighten
Helps us more and more:
O the millions living
Toiling in the night!
O the task of giving
To such millions light!

Sadly, Sosso’s wife Emma died in 1914, at the age of 53. Sosso never remarried, and died in Marin County on 2 November 1967 at the age of 98.

In the Realms of Gold was issued in a limited edition of 500 copies, printed on non-watermarked laid paper by the Murdock Press. The cover artwork is not signed but is undoubtedly by Morgan Shepard, who probably also designed the tomoye on the title page. The frontispiece, a single leaf on coated stock, is a signed portrait of Sosso. On the title page, Elder is still calling himself “D. P. Elder.” There is no colophon.

Paul Elder published a lot of poetry in his career: of the 414 titles on the checklist, at least sixty-one (15%) are poetry. While much of it is forgettable poetry, there are exceptions, such as Irene Hardy’s Poems (1902). It is likely a vanity publication, a limited edition of 300 printed by Charles A. Murdock; half of those were later lost in a fire. The binding and paper are of good quality, and the typography is typical of the period: crisp typeface but a small font, leaving generous white space around the edges of the page.

George Hamlin Fitch, literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, thought Hardy’s poems were among the small amount of fine verse written in California, mentioning in particular her skill with sonnets.

The author’s name is consistently printed as “Irenè Hardy”: note the odd placement of the grave accent, which in French would normally be over the first E, “Irène.” Hardy’s poem “With the Field-Lark” was the featured supplement in the June 1902 edition of Impressions Quarterly, where her name is spelled instead with an acute accent: Irené. One possibility is that Hardy eccentrically pronounced her name Irené (ee-re-NAY) and wanted her name spelled that way, but that Murdock mistakenly printed it as Irenè. (Hardy was not French; she was born in Ohio.)

Hardy’s verses may no longer be remembered, but since her death in 1922, Stanford University has held an Irene Hardy Poetry Contest, now called the “Clarence Urmy-Irene Hardy Prize for Poetry.”

Irene Hardy died in 1922. An obituary was published in The Stanford Illustrated Review:

Irene Hardy, a student at Stanford from 1892 to 1895 and a member of the English department faculty from 1894 to 1901, died June 4 at her home, 453 Melville Avenue, Palo Alto, following an attack of pneumonia. She was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, eighty-one years ago [22 July 1841] and for the last fifteen years had been totally blind. In spite of her handicap, she continued to write, publishing verse in the “Sunset” and other periodicals. To the last she retained the admiration and devotion of her former pupils and associates, both of Stanford and the Oakland High School, where she taught for twelve years before coming to Stanford. She began teaching at 16 years of age and after taught in Antioch, Iowa, Preparatory School. In 1861, the opening year of the Civil War, she entered Antioch College, of which Horace Mann was first president. Because of failing health, she came to California in 1871 and remained here until here death. Miss Hardy was widely known as a poet. A little book of her verse [Poems] was published in 1902 in San Francisco. Half of the edition was later destroyed in a bookstore fire and the remaining volumes were taken up by students. Among the poems included in the volume are “Ole for Forefather’s Day,” “1887,” “Ariel and Caliban,” “A Wedding Day Gallop,” and “Palo Alto Hills.” Her work later appeared in “The Overland Monthly,” “Sunset” and other periodicals. She was a pioneer in the educational field in California and had a lasting influence on the teaching of composition and literature.¹The Stanford Illustrated Review, Volume 23, Issue 9, June 1922, p467

 

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  The Stanford Illustrated Review, Volume 23, Issue 9, June 1922, p467

In 1915, the poet Snow Langley was 36 years old and unmarried: a “spinster” in the thankfully now-obsolete parlance. Spinning wool was typically the job of unmarried women, and spinster was used in legal documents as early as the 1600s to denote an unmarried woman who was likely to stay that way. One might think, then, that a book entitled Sonnets of Spinsterhood would be full of bitterness about years of loneliness. However, a better indication of what lies ahead is in the subtitle: A Spinster’s Book of Dreams: Delicate Traceries of Dim Desires. Langley writes in her introduction:

These Sonnets need, perhaps, a word of explanation. In a recent reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, the conviction was borne in upon me that the sentiment of love is worthy of expression, whether or not it outwardly finds an object; “for the romantic passion” as a dream, an ideal or a memory is a source of inspiration in every human life. I have endeavored to make the sequence of sonnets show the ideal progress from the personal to the racial, from the love which seeks individual expression to the love for humanity.

The book is bound in lavender paper, highlighting the personal, feminine nature of the content. The beautiful decorations are by Audley B. Wells, whom Elder used in a number of his publications.

Nannie Snow Longley was born in Ohio in 1879. Her family moved to California some time after, and she graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1896, where she gave the valedictory address, a historical narrative entitled “The Ballad of Lady Mary.” She left the ranks of spinsterhood at the age of 49 when she married Grant S. Housh in 1928; they had no children. For many years she was an English teacher at Los Angeles High School, where one of her students was the future science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury; he credited her with instilling in him a love of poetry. She died in 1963 and is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

The story of Abelard and Heloise is too well known to need repetition here, for these two rank with the few great historic lovers of the world, as well they may. The love of Heloise was sublime in its intensity, romantic in its constancy, appealing in its pathos, and tragic in its suffering.

When I first picked up Abelard and Heloise, I had never heard their names before. But one hundred years ago, so Ella Costillo Bennett informs me, I would have known all about them. (I hope this reflects the great differences in literary curriculum between then and now, as opposed to my ignorance of a story that everyone knows!) Bennett has taken some of their love letters and rewritten them as poems.

Pierre Abélard (1079–1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian, composer and preeminent logician. Héloïse d’Argenteuil (1090?–1164) was a French writer, scholar, and later a nun and abbess. Their story is certainly a captivating one: two brilliant scholars who meet, fall in love, are separated, but continue to meet in secret. She becomes pregnant and bears a son, they are married but then separated again when Héloïse is sent to a convent. (I am leaving out many details.) They begin a long correspondance, which has become the thing of legend.

Even their mortal remains have become legendary. Their bodies were moved several times over the intervening centuries, most recently to Père Lachaise Cemetery in 1817 by Josephine Bonaparte. At the time, Père Lachaise was outside the dense urban area of Paris, and the reburial is thought to have considerably increased the cemetery’s popularity. It has since become tradition for lovers, or lonely singles, to leave letters at their tomb in hopes of finding true love.

Paul Elder published Abelard and Heloise in a limited edition of 500 copies in 1907, accompanied by illustrations by Will Jenkins. He published a trade edition in 1911.

Ella Costillo Bennett (1865-1932) was a San Francisco socialite and a minor player in the local literary scene. She was a feature writer for a number of newspapers, including The Wasp and The Pacific Coast Weekly (for which she wrote “Knocks from the Iconoclast”), and an associate editor for Mythland, a children’s magazine.

Much of what is known about Ella Bennett comes from a 138-page scrapbook (now at the University of Colorado at Boulder), created by her daughter Mary L. Bennett. In addition to manuscript letters, typescripts of original poetry, and published articles written by Ella, the scrapbook contains materials relating to the women’s suffrage movement and anti-war petitions. Also figuring prominently is Ella’s son Ray Raphael Bennett (1895-1957), a television and film actor.

As I write these words, the political situation in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea is explosive. Historically part of Russia but given to Ukraine in the 1950s, Russia is threatening military action to recover it. So this week I am featuring verses by the Polish poet and activist Adam Mickiewicz, entitled Sonnets From the Crimea. (in Polish, Sonety Krymski). Originally published in 1826, this edition is from August 1917, one of the last books issued by Paul Elder prior to his retirement from regular publishing. It is a slim undecorated volume, with uninspired typography but well-made and printed on quality laid paper.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is a renowned figure in Polish literature. He is one of Poland’s “Three Bards,” along with Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński, and is of comparative importance to Lord Byron in English or Goethe in German. He was also a political activist, and campaigned for Poland’s independence from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania–for which he spent five years in exile in Russia. He spent most of his later life in Rome and Paris, but died in Istanbul while organizing Poles and Jews to fight against Russia in the Crimean War.

The poem highlighted in the image below, “The Ruins of Balaclava,” refers to the Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 between the British and Russian forces. That was also the day of the Charge of the Light Brigade, where miscommunication among the British officers led to the brigade’s charge directly into Russian cannons, resulting in grievous casualties. Tennyson wrote his famous poem just six weeks later, to great acclaim.

The poetry was translated by Edna Worthley Underwood (1873–1961), who learned many languages despite little formal education. Her first works were chiefly historical novels, but by the time of Sonnets From the Crimea she had turned chiefly to poetry and translations. In addition to Polish, she also worked in Russian, Spanish, Farsi, Japanese and Chinese.