Genevieve Taggard

“In the little church my parents attended in Honolulu I was impressed with the text, "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." When we sat listening I had only to move my eyes from the minister to see outside the flowering vines and colored trees of abundance. Nevertheless, or perhaps because we lived a rich sensuous life, the text became my own. I have never ceased to think that the text, taken literally, should be the aim of all governments. I scoff at those who tell me solemnly that government must be something else. I am not interested in anything else. . .”
Genevieve Taggard, “Preface to Origin: Hawaii (1947)

Born in 1894 to school teacher/missionaries, radical poet Genevieve Taggard attended high school in Hawaii where her first poem was published and she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1920, taking six years due to the need to work to support her family. The hardship of her early life and the social commitment of her parents are reflected in her poetry, which shares a passionate concern for the rights and welfare of the working classes and a dedication to proletarian and feminist causes.

Taggard published a dozen collections of poetry and several chapbooks, including Not Mine to Finish; Poems 1928-1934 (1934), Calling Western Union (1936) and Slow Music (1946) all published by Harper. Taggard was a supporter and enthusiast for poetry, founding and editing Measure: a magazine of verse, with Padraic Colum and Maxwell Anderson and served as a contributing editor to the New Masses in the thirties. She also edited four anthologies, Continent's End, an Anthology of California Verse published in 1925 (with George Sterling and James Rorty, May Days: an anthology of verse from Masses/Liberator (1925), Circumference, varieties of metaphysical experience (1929) and Ten Introductions, with Dudley Fitts (1934). Taggard was in part responsible for the “discovery” of Emily Dickinson, contributing an early biography. She also taught at Bennington College from 1932-1935 and at Sarah Lawrence College for ten years until 1946, when she was forced to retire under mysterious circumstances. She died on November 8, 1948, having “rolled like a marble,” from New York to Vermont with Capri and South Hadley, Massachusetts in between.

Although her earlier books For Eager Lovers (Selzer, 1922) and Words for the Chisel (Knopf, 1926) were composed of mostly love lyrics, Traveling Still: Poems 1918-1928 (Knopf, 1928) includes several poems that prefigure her later socially conscious poetry of the thirties. That later body of work, in particular Calling Western Union (Harper, 1936) provides a vivid and important record of a socially radical woman's life, unfortunately marginalized and buried by the critical hegemony of the New Critics at mid-century. Although poets as diverse as Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, William Rose Benet and Josephine Miles appreciated her work, even during her own time there was some tendency during her own time to depreciate her work for the directness of expression of her social themes. This “repression' even continued recently with Marjorie Perloff's uncharacteristic and unexplainable little attack on Taggard in her review of Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

“Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me? No indeed. I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial. (Although I will write anonymous confessions for The Nation.) That is her story--and her second defeat. She thinks I owed her a Christian gentlewoman, for all she did for me. We quarrel. After I escaped, she snapped shut the iron trap around my brother and sister. That is their story. I do not know if they will ever be free of her. She keeps Eddie Guest on the parlor table beside the books I have written--a silent protest against me. She is not pleased.”
Genevieve Taggard, “Poet out of Pioneer,” The Nation (1927)