Love Songs

Poetry was a form of liberation. The all-engrossing subject was love.

Love Songs is a collective biography of nine American women poets who lived and wrote, primarily, in the first half of the twentieth century and were important in the emergence of New York City as the literary capital of the nation. They knew one another, and sometimes reviewed, criticized, and encouraged each other’s work. The poems presented here are lyric poems, short song-like poems of many moods and forms, on many varied subjects – relationships, urban life, modernism and traditionalism, contemporary politics, and, above John Dizikes all, the infinite varieties of love.

Léonie Adams subtly explored the metaphysics of contemporary love.

Louise Bogan, a wide-ranging observer of the contemporary scene, was influential as poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Amy Lowell, a pioneer of free verse and Modernist Imagism, was a prolific essayist and reviewer, and a biographer of Keats.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, a compelling performer and a cultural force, was America’s most-read poet.

Marianne Moore, unconventional in every regard, was an incomparable Modernist, her poetry unique in point of view and style.

Genevieve Taggard, an editor and an early champion of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, explored radicalism and contemporary politics in her own work.

Millay, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, and Dorothy Parker were popular to a degree which seems extraordinary now. Their work was widely quoted, printed and reprinted in newspapers and journals, and performed for large audiences both live and via radio.

Varied and independent, all were triumphantly successful in the courage with which they wrote.