MANUSCRIPT: 7 page manuscript on Thomas Boyd.
INSCRIBED
Taggard, Genevieve. For Eager Lovers. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922.
8vo.; purple topstain; endpapers offset; green paper-covered boards; spine lightly browned; printed labels to upper panel and spine; dust-jacket; spine browned and nicked; tape reinforcement.
First edition of Taggard’s first book, whose success success ignited her career. Taggard published fifteen other titles, including The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (1930); the critically acclaimed Words for the Chisel (1926); Traveling Standing Still: Poems, 1918-1928 (1928); and her volume of protest poetry, Calling Western Union (1936). She also contributed to periodicals, edited collections of poetry, and wrote lyrics for Prologue, a composition for chorus and orchestra by William Schuman that was preformed at Carnegie Hall in 1939.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Paul Jordan Smith with best wishes, Genevieve Taggard. Smith added a note beneath: “In Claremont, 1922 / Genevieve wrote out her ‘The Tourist’ on the last fly-leaf of this volume – P.J.S.” Indeed, Taggard’s fifteen-line poem is present in black ink, in her hand, on the recto of the rear endpaper:
He saw the hula flower in her hair
Drop to her bosom where it rose and fell:
Forgotten was her lover, slow her stare
Felt for his eyes; her warm body’s smell,
The yellow-stamen perfume on her breath
The poison = heavy sleepiness of death
Made all her figure’s slender golden grace
Seem like a [ ] in an altered place…
Swinging she danced the hula: and the moon
Hung on the mountains honey in the night.
Her dress of flowers whirled about her, strewn
Along the grass the fine petals died…
Then like a bat against that disc of light
Leaped up her lover, and the lonely, wide
Hollow and shadow echoed as he cried
Poet, professor, editor, and biographer Genevieve Taggard was born in Washington State in 1894 to parents who were members of the Disciples of Christ, fruit farmers and missionaries. When she was a child, her family moved to Honolulu, where Taggard’s father ran a multicultural school. Despite, or perhaps because of, her parents’ strict rule that no books be kept in their home except the Bible, Taggard developed a strong interest in reading and writing. She edited her high school newspaper, later enrolling in the University of California at Berkeley where she studied English and wrote for the school’s literary magazine, the Occident. When she graduated in 1919, she moved to New York where she worked for modernist publisher B.W. Huebsch. From 1921-26 she edited her own literary journal, The Measure. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and held teaching positions at Bennington, Mount Holyoke, and Sarah Lawrence colleges. A self-described Socialist, she was a member of several organizations that were devoted to social reform; she also belonged to the Teachers Union and the League of American Writers. She married twice: first to the poet Robert L. Wolf, with whom she had a daughter, Marcia, and later to the journalist Kenneth Durant. She died in New York City at age 53 from hypertension.
(Notable American Women Volume III; www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/taggard/bio.htm; Biography Resource Center)
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