Our Literary Grannies from A to Z: K is for Katharine Lee Bates

Today’s literary granny has not one, but TWO statues I found honoring her when I did my image searches. This is rare – so I wanted to include them here. She is also one of the few songwriters I have featured. If you are American, you may know her song.

Katharine Lee Bates statue in Colorado Springs + A photo from Harvard If you are in my age group or before and are American, I am sure you know her song.

Beyond that, she was an educator who advocated quality education for girls and women, again at a time when this wasn’t necessarily standard for us.

So – without more waggling to the point – I introduce today’s Literary Granny – Katharine lee Bates, the lyricist for "America, the Beautiful."

She wrote this song after adventuring to Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs in 1893, so one of her statues is of her gazing upon the glorious view… that is until some unthinking, unaware developers put a building up right in her way. Why does this not surprise me? Nobody thought about it, I suppose. The song started its life as a poem published in The Congregationalist two years after she wrote it. The Boston Evening Transcript   followed it with a revised version in 1904. It was revered immediately and then, turned into the song we continue to love.

Sadly, sometimes thoughtfulness trumps America, the Beautiful… this American sadly says.

Katharine Bates was educated at one of the leading colleges for women: Wellesley

This statue of Katharine Lee Bates is in Cape Cod (at a younger age) College. This campus is where she chose to have her career in academia. Sometimes this career overshadowed her many poems and essays. Her first poem, “Sleep” was published in the Atlantic while she was still an undergraduate.

What I especially love about her poetry is how she takes something fairly mundane – a simple wildflower – and writes it a love poem.  See what I mean, in this excerpt?

So it began,
This vagabond, unvalued yellow clover,
To be our tenderest language. All the years
It lent a new zest to the summer hours,
As each of us went scheming to surprise
The other with our homely, laureate flowers,
Sonnets and odes,
Fringing our daily roads.

Today, when you are out doing your own version of adventuring, consider the beauty in whatever you see – even and especially that which may not appear beautiful to the ordinary eye. Remember, you aren’t ordinary. You are reading this, aren’t you?

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Tomorrow’s Literary Granny:Katharine Lee Bates

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This post is a part of my series Our Literary Grannies from A t0 Z which was inspired by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Find out more about the Challenge by clicking here.

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