It has been a while since I have written a biographical sketch about a woman writer in literary history. Today I went through my file filled with photos of these women and randomly selected Alice Corbin Henderson as the subject of today's sketch. Enjoy!
I adore this portrait of Alice Corbin Henderson!
"I saw the world go by and laughed as it was going."
Alice Corbin Henderson.
I knew when I first saw her photo that poet Alice Corbin and I would become friends. Now, I could tell she was also long gone – a revered woman poet, critic, an early associate editor of Poetry Magazine – I knew she belonged in my women in literary history knowledge bank.
She was an avant-garde poet, an imagist, who was originally from St. Louis, joining the ranks of Kate Chopin and Zoe Akins as late 19th and early 20th century women writers from that city.
She studied at the University of Chicago. Her first collection of poetry, The Linnet Songs, was published in 1898. In 1904 she rented a studio in the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, where she met her future husband, visiting professor. William Penhallow Henderson. He was a painter, architect and furniture designer. Together they had a daughter, Alice Oliver Henderson.
In 1912 her second collection of poems, The Spinning Woman of the Sky. She left Chicago for Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1916, after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis. She continued working on Poetry Magazine by long distance until 1922. Later, she was curator at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.
When she arrived in Santa Fe, she was not only inspired by the people there, but also the cultures and art from the native Americans she met along the way. She became an activist on the behalf of Native Americans.
She also was in a group of poets in Santa Fe who called each other “Poet’s Round Up” and included DH Lawrence, Witter Bynner, Yvor Winters, and several other poets. The group fizzled out until resurrected by Alice Oliver Henderson when she returned to Santa Fe as an adult. The group evolved into "Writer's Round Up" and was quite a big part of the Santa Fe art scene, especially in the 1930's.
I fell in love with this poem, published in Poetry Magazine in 1916.
Apparitions
A thin gray shadow on the edge of thought
Hiding its wounds –
These are the wounds of sorrow
It was my hand that made them
And this gray shadow resembles you
Is my own heart, weeping
You sleep quietly beneath the shade
Of willows in the south
= = =
To find out more, here is a fascinating chronology and list of papers held by the library at the University of Texas.
I had better luck searching simply "Alice Corbin" if you would like to do research on your own to get to know this fascinating woman more deeply.
