In Barnard Country
A thesis topic discovery and a life’s work in the poetry of Mary Barnard ’32.
Thirty years ago this spring, I sat in the ¾«¶«AV library amidst the seniors writing their theses. On the shelf above me were books by my subject—poet, translator, and ¾«¶«AV alumna Mary Barnard ’32. Friends photographed me at my desk looking wistfully up to the books in a professorial pose. We were “the Brits,” at ¾«¶«AV on a year’s exchange.
I had no idea where the thesis was going. I couldn’t stop thinking about the poems—they were astonishingly good, but I couldn’t explain why. I didn’t know then that Barnard had experienced similar paralysis when attempting her own senior thesis over 1931–32, so much so that her exasperated professors let her submit poems in place of a critical thesis.
But the overlaps didn’t stop there. I loved the modernist poets, studying them in a legendary class run by ¾«¶«AV professor Ellen K. Stauder [English 1983–2013]. Barnard had also been drawn to the modernists because of a similar torch lit at ¾«¶«AV by another legendary professor, Lloyd Reynolds, recalling of her junior year:
I no longer know which came first, the day I wrote a poem liberated, at least, from a whalebone corset, or the day when Lloyd wrote out several lines of Pound’s poetry on the blackboard, waved his arms about, and proclaimed, “The man who could do that could do anything!” [. . .] I copied the lines in my notebook, feeling skeptical, yet intrigued. The lines were from the “Homage to Sextus Propertius” [. . .]. They bit deep. I returned to Gill’s bookstore the copy of the Harriet Monroe anthology that my mother gave me for my birthday, and brought home [Pound’s] Personae instead. I was beginning to know at last the country I wanted to explore. (Assault on Mount Helicon, p. 39, 1984)
Scratching around for a thesis topic—a requirement was that “the Brits” write a thesis connected to their US locality—Ellen said, “Well, there is this one poet, Mary Barnard. I think you’ll like her work.” She could even introduce us if I should like. It is one of the biggest regrets of my life that I didn’t take her up on it—I was shy, awkward, and 20 years old. But like Barnard, I was beginning, myself, to “know at last the country I wanted to explore.”
It was while doing my master’s dissertation on literary translation that Barnard’s poems spoke to me again. Not only had Barnard written a ground-breaking translation of Sappho, but it had also endured—a bestseller since its publication in 1958. I wanted to know the linguistic basis that made it so good. That was the easy part. What was difficult was the customary literature review—who was Mary Barnard, and what have others said about her?
I had answers to the first question (born 1909 in Vancouver, Washington; correspondent of Ezra Pound; relocated to New York in 1936 on Pound’s advice, where she met William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore; inaugural curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo, New York; researcher to Carl Van Doren; returned to the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s; winner of the Elliston Award for Collected Poems in 1979 and the Western States Book Award for Poetry in 1986). But for the second question—very little.
If the critical literature on Mary Barnard wasn’t there, I decided I should correct the balance and write it myself. I enrolled in a PhD program determined to find out substantially more about “Barnard country” and firmly place her work in the American literary canon.
The research took in several more libraries, the most wonderful being the collection of Barnard’s friend and literary executor, Elizabeth J. Bell, also in Vancouver, Washington, who had the mammoth task of collating the wealth of literary material in Barnard’s condo following her death in 2001. Betty generously donated Barnard’s archive to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, to join the American literature collection, home also to the Pound and Williams archives.
Following a Beinecke fellowship, I transformed my PhD into Mary Barnard, American Imagist (SUNY, 2013). I still have that shelf of Barnard’s books, all but her Sappho now out of print, at home with me in the UK. They’re joined this month by a companion volume I’ve edited, Mary Barnard: Complete Poems and Selected Translations, which brings her life’s work into one place, amplified by previously unpublished poems, literary correspondence, and Barnard’s reflections on her creative practice. For poetry lovers, scholars and writers: here be Barnard country!
This essay is excerpted and reprinted with permission of SUNY Press, where it first appeared as a guest blog post.
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