Who is Anna Wickham?
It is well within the order of things
that man should listen when his mate sings,
but the true male never walked
who liked to listen while his mate talked.Anna Wickham (1833-1947), a British poet with an Australian upbringing, was associated with an international host of writers: David Garnett, part of the Bloomsbury group; D.H. Lawrence, who recommended her poems to Chicago's Poetry magazine, then in its infancy; Harold Monro, who was the first to publish her work; Louis Untermeyer, who called her "a magnificent gypsy of a woman;" lesbian heiress Natalie Barney, who was the touchstone for her imagination for almost twenty years; Malcolm Lowry, who counted her among his close friends; and her husband Patrick Hepburn, who tried to silence her and instead goaded her into poetry.
On April 8th at Barnes & Noble, Jennifer Jones will read a short selection from her biography-in-progress, A Major Woman: The Life of Anna Wickham, Poet. Sybil Robinson, Professor Emeritus at UW-Madison, will read some of the poems of Anna Wickham.
These are links to three of her poems; close the new window to return to this page.
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