"To clear the drifts of spring"
Five poems from 100 years ago; Angelina Weld Grimké, Mina Loy, Anne Spencer, Alfonsina Storni & Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Last April, we marked National Poetry Month with four short poems from four (long?) centuries. This year, we’ll stay in the public domain but go back only one century to present five very different poems from five very different poets who were all writing, publishing and living remarkable lives at the same time. As much as they vary in style and shape, these poems share a modern voice and urgency no less alive today than one hundred years ago.
Alfonsina Storni was one of the few Latin American women poets with an international readership at this time; “¿Y tú?…” appeared as “Running Water” in a 1925 issue of Poetry dedicated to Spanish-language modern poetry from the Americas. “The Black Finger” by Angelina Weld Grimké, “I Bring Her a Flower” by Sylvia Townsend Warner, “O Hell” by Mina Loy, and “Dunbar” by Anne Spencer were all published between 1920 and 1925, in journals and/or collections or anthologies. But each of these poets left behind many works that were not published during the authors’ lifetimes.
These women wrote poems in the midst of every kind of obstacle—personal, political, existential—often without much expectation of an audience to share them with. As Anne Spencer once explained in an interview: “You write because you can’t stop writing.”1 Sylvia Townsend Warner once joked to her publisher, “I intend to be a posthumous poet!”2 We can be their audience now; there is so much to explore in each poet’s work and life. This is just a sampling.
Five Poems, 1920-1925
“The Black Finger” by Angelina Weld Grimké
I have just seen a most beautiful thing,
Slim and still,
Against a gold, gold sky,
A straight black cypress,
Sensitive,
Exquisite,
A black finger
Pointing upwards.
Why, beautiful still finger, are you black?
And why are you pointing upwards?From The New Negro: An Interpretation, Edited by Alain Locke, Albert and Charles Boni (1925).
Angelina Weld Grimké’s private notebooks contained dozens of poems that never made it to print while she was alive. “The Black Finger,” however, was anthologized several times, marking an early and essential entry in the burgeoning catalog of Harlem Renaissance poetry. Like many of Grimké’s poems, it combines powerful imagery with clearly articulated human emotion.
“I Bring Her a Flower” by Sylvia Townsend Warner
SWEET faith
Such looks of quiet hath
That those on whom she's smiled
Lie down to sleep as easy as a child.
No night,
However dark, can fright
Them, no, nor day
To come, however bleak and fell, dismay.
But sound
Sleep they in prison-bound
As when at liberty.
And if they wake, they wake in charity;
Like her,
Who rousing at the jar
Of weary foot in the rain
Pitied the wakeful sentry for his pain.
Like her: Rosa LuxemburgFrom The Espalier, Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press (1925).
This poem from Townsend Warner’s first collection was written in honor of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), a revolutionary who co-led the German Communist Party until she was kidnapped and murdered by anti-communist Freikorps paramilitaries ordered by the government. Feminist magazine Lux, which publishes lots of writing about feminist authors of the past and present, is named after Luxemburg.
“O Hell” by Mina Loy
To clear the drifts of spring
Of our forbear’s excrements
And bury the subconscious archives
Under unaffected flowers
Indeed—
Our person is a covered entrance to infinity
Choked with the tatters of tradition
Goddesses and Young Gods
Caress the sanctity of Adolescence
In the shaft of the sun.From Contact, Edited by William Carlos Williams and Robert M. McAlmon (No. 1, December 1920). [Typos from original corrected]
Contact was an experimental magazine co-founded by poets William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon to promote the theory that poetry should reflect the poet’s direct experience and their interaction with the time and place from which they are writing. Loy’s poem, which calls for artists to reject tradition and create freely, was in the inaugural issue, which also featured work by Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, and more. McAlmon’s Contact Editions press published Loy’s first collection Lunar Baedecker [sic] in 1923.
“Running Water” / “¿Y tú?...” by Alfonsina Storni
Yes, I move, I live, I wander astray— Water running, intermingling, over the sands. I know the passionate pleasure of motion; I taste the forests; I touch strange lands. Yes, I move—perhaps I am seeking Storms, suns, dawns, a place to hide. What are you doing here, pale and polished— You, the stone in the path of the tide? — Si, yo me muevo, vivo, me equivoco; Agua que corre y se entremezcla, siento El vértigo feroz del movimiento: Huelo las selvas, tierra nueva toco. Si, yo me muevo, voy buscando acaso Soles, auroras, tempestad y olvido. ¿Qué haces allí misérrimo y pulido? Eres la piedra a cuyo lado paso.
“Running Water” translated by Muna Lee, from Poetry (June 1925); ¿Y tú?... from Irremediablemente..., Cooperativa Editorial Limitada (1919).
The 1925 issue of Poetry presented work by “modernistas” across Latin America, translated from Spanish by Muna Lee. In an editor’s note titled “Pan-American Concord” Harriet Monroe asks the magazine’s readers to approach the poems with “friendly consideration, emphasized by the realization that any translation of poetry…should always be read with the feeling of the veil in one's mind: one should try to look through it with an eye that intensifies the perceptible colors; one should listen through it with an ear that translates back the sound-effects and rhythm-effects of an alien language, and imagines what these would be in the poet's own tongue.”
“Dunbar” by Anne Spencer
Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I— Ah, how poets sing and die!
From The Book of American Negro Poetry, Edited by James Weldon Johnson, Harcourt, Brace, and Company (1922).
In the essential introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry, editor James Weldon Johnson muses on how, of the featured poets, only Paul Laurence Dunbar had achieved widespread literary fame at the time of publication. However, anyone reading the anthology would have to agree, he asserts, that “It is this side of prophecy to declare that the undeniable creative genius of the Negro is destined to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to American poetry.” Echoing Johnson’s prediction, Anne Spencer’s “Dunbar” draws a direct line from the brief lives and monumental legacies of English-language poets of the previous two centuries to the brief life and huge poetic legacy of Dunbar. And, though her speaker is presumably Dunbar himself, her “I” can suggest that she is claiming that legacy for her own future, and potentially for other Black women poets.
Cita Canon Spotlight
The poets featured this month all experienced some form of recognition during their lifetime, whether through inclusion in still-essential anthologies or in critical acclaim with small or wide circles. However, they all deserve wider legacies and expanded readership in this century.
As a poet, activist, educator, librarian, and gardener, Anne Spencer (1882-1975) knew how to nurture life and beauty. Spencer introduced herself to readers of the 1927 anthology Caroling Dusk in this way: “…I have no academic honors, nor lodge regalia…I write about some of the things I love. But have no civilized articulation for the things I hate. I proudly love being a Negro woman—it’s so involved and interesting. We are the PROBLEM—the great national game of TABOO.” Her wry humor, passion for language, and “cool precision” made her influence extend far beyond Edankraal, the studio her husband built for her in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her home is now in the National Register of Historic Places; her garden is the only restored garden of an African American figure. A new film, Earth, I Thank You: The Garden and Legacy of Anne Spencer, premieres this May at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. [The Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum; Anne Spencer: I am Here! at the University of Virginia Library.]
As evident in the above poem “O Hell,” Mina Loy (1882-1966) was ready to tear down old ways of thinking and build anew. Her tools of choice were poems, paintings, and experimental works such as 1914’s “Feminist Manifesto.” She was a divisive and fascinating figure to her peers, her radical poems sparking admiration and confusion from others in the Modernist poetry scene. Her life was marked by several personal tragedies, as well as adventures across several countries, intellectual exploration, and friendships with many fellow artists and thinkers. [Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable at Bowdoin College; Mina Loy — Navigating the Avant-Garde.]
“Much of the meaning of Angelina Weld Grimké’s [1880-1958] life was set even before she was born,” Akasha Gloria Hull wrote in a 1979 essay for the magazine Conditions. After coming into this world with a family history that reflected the deepest, most complicated pains of a country and its past, Grimké navigated dark realities through poetry, plays, stories, and essays. She is often remembered for the play Rachel, one of the earliest anti-lynching plays; it was first performed in Washington, D.C. in 1916 followed by a historic run in New York City at the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1917. In addition to works that appeared in important journals and anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance, Grimké wrote dozens of poems that went unpublished during her life, including love poems that grappled with queer longing and identity. Black feminists like Hull and Audre Lorde rediscovered and wrote about Grimké in the 1970s/1980s; as of 2025 her work has not been brought together in a collection. [“Angela Weld Grimké and Archival Rediscovery” from We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive at Yale University Libraries.]
Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) was an Argentinian poet, fiction writer, and playwright known for the eroticism of her poems and her bold feminist themes. She was one of the first Argentinian women writers to find commercial and critical success. Her third collection, Languidez (Languor 1920), won the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize. She formed close friendships with many other writers, including Chilean poet Gabriel Mistral (a future Nobel Prize winner) and Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou. [“Alfonsina Storni: The Poetess that Broke from the Pack”by Kate Bowen for The Argentina Independent; Alfonsina Storni at Discography of American Historical Recordings.]
Though her literary career began with poetry, Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) is better known for novels like Lolly Willowes (1926). Her fiction was one of the early revival focuses of Virago Press, with Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart included in the first five books in the Virago Modern Classics series. The last poetry collection published during her lifetime, Whether a Dove or Seagull (1934), was a joint effort with her partner, Valentine Ackland. It was received with dismissal and confusion from critics, who focused on the poets’ decision to obscure specific authorship attribution and avoided engaging with the poems’ lesbian undertones. All of Warner’s work—poetry and prose—was concerned with what she called “the oddness of the world and the surprisingness of mankind.” As late Virago founder Carmen Callil instructed in 2016: “Read everything she wrote and have a most happy life.” [The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society]
What Else?
Angelina Weld Grimké was a regular at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s S Street Salon, the subject of February’s Bulletin. Anne Spencer also hosted a literary salon in her home, welcoming many of the same figures who attended the S Street Salon.
Much of the influential feminist poetry of the 1920s and earlier was written in languages other than English, and translations of these important works can remain hard to find.
Read our August 2024 Bulletin about the translation history of Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, whose first collection came out in 1922.
Share your “translation wishlists” with us in the comments and we’ll share them this August for Women in Translation Month. For example, we would love more visible and accessible translation of poems by Bing Xin, Lin Huiyin, Juana de Ibarbourou, and more.
Bay Area book friends can catch us at the Santa Rosa Zine Fest on May 3! The event is free and outside. Join us at the Sonoma County Library, North West Branch for free mini-zines, bookmarks, and book chats between 1 and 5 pm.
We had a great time connecting with people in person at the Other Islands Book Fair in Brooklyn earlier this month. Thank you to the organizers and to Pratt’s Graduate Communications Design program!
William Drake, The First Wave: Women Poets in America, 1915-1945, New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1987.
Clare Harman, “Lightening from the Skies,” The Guardian, March 28, 2008.