Josephine Preston Peabody:
May 30, 1874 - December 4, 1922
Josephine Preston Peabody was born into a family that was financially impoverished and literature rich.
From the time she was able, little Josephine read. And read and read, anything she could get her hands on. Her first publishing credit was when she was only fourteen-years-old, a poem in Women’s Journal. Even though she didn’t finish the typical schooling of a more wealthy child, she was able to enroll in Radcliffe College as a “special student” because of her publishing credits. Later, she was a teacher at Wellesley College.
Obviously her literature rich background served her well!
She wrote both poetry and drama, with her earliest plays being “verse plays” and often times featured the lives of other famous poets or historical heroines and heroes. She wrote a drama about St. Francis of Assissi and a play about Mary Wollstonecraft, a British woman who brought her views to the US partially in order to shake up American women in the mid nineteenth century. Her most famous play, however, was titled The Piper and was an allegory based on based on the legend of the Pied Piper. It won the prestigious Stratford Prize in England in 1910.
What really caught my interest in Josephine, though, was her strong opinions in a New York Times article written in 1916. Can you imagine this headline today? “Free Verse Hampers Poets and is Undemocratic!” with the subtitle “nonetheless, the War is making poetry less exclusive and the imagiste cult will be swept away!”
Also in the January 23 article, Josephine passionately declares, “I do object to free verse when it turns into a cult that denies other freedoms to other poets! And I object to the bigotry of some people who are trying to impose free verse upon an uninterested world!”
Oh, how I love my kindred poets. They are the best, aren’t they? Even when I don't agree with their views, their hearts are so beloved by me!
Tomorrow – our featured Women Writer in Literary History is one of my favorites: Kate Chopin. I hope you will return to learn more about her, our first Southern novelist.
This blog post is an entry in the A to Z Challenge. Each day in April (except Sundays) I will be featuring a woman in literary history. If you click on the logo below, you will be introduced to the writing of more than a thousand bloggers writing on a wide variety of topics in April, all from A to Z!
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She teaches a teleclass/ecourse "Discover the Power of Writing & Telling Engaging, Enlightening Stories" which begins again April 19, 2012. Find details by clicking this link.
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