On June 4

On this day in ...
... 1917, the 1st Pulitzers were awarded, and the all-male board gave a prize to women won in 1 of the 4 categories. The winning book in the Biography or Autobiography category was Julia Ward Howe (1916), written by Laura E. Richards (left) (credit) and Maude Howe Elliott assisted by Florence Howe Hall. All 3 were daughters of the subject of the 2-volume work, the slavery abolitionist and women's suffragist at right (credit) who, as we've posted: in 1862, wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," an anthem that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said precipitated the Civil War, then 8 years later wrote an antiwar poem that launched Mother's Day. Ward Howe died at age 91 about 5 years before her daughters earned the prize.

(Prior June 4 posts are here, here, and here.)

On February 1

On this day in ...

... 1946, Trygve Lie (left) of Norway was elected the 1st Secretary-General of the United Nations. A carpenter's son who entered public life through Norway's Labour Party, Lie had served both before and after World War II in a number of in his country's government, among them Minister of Justice, Foreign Minister, and chief of delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference that adopted the U.N. Charter. Lie resigned in 1952 in the face of Soviet opposition triggered by the U.N. role in the Korean War.

... 1862, Julia Ward Howe (right) published a poem in the Atlantic Monthly, a periodical in circulation to this day. Entitled "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," it left little doubt but that in the author's view that in the Civil War it was the Union enjoyed divine approval. Emblematic is the concluding stanza of what would become an American anthem:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Notably, Howe equated the Union cause with her own cause, the abolition of slavery, though President Abraham Lincoln would not move toward even partial emancipation for another 9 months, as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has detailed in her Team of Rivals (2005). (image credit)

Celebrate poetry

Today begins National Poetry Month, an annual event for more than a decade in the United States and Canada. Organizers admit that April was chosen because school's still in session and teachers can plan lessons around the commemoration; still, tongue in cheek, they pay note to notable in-verse invocations of the month:

T.S. Eliot wrote, 'April is the cruelest month.' It is our hope that National Poetry Month lessens that effect.

On a lighter note, Chaucer wrote:
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flow

Finally, Edna St. Vincent Millay asked, 'To what purpose, April, do you return again?' For National Poetry month, of course!

Skimming of lists of poets (here and here) turns up many whom IntLawGrrls have profiled over the months of our existence; for example: Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Atwood, Emily Brontë, Julia Ward Howe, Emma Lazarus, Gabriela Mistral, and Alice Walker. In honor of today's kickoff we'll add another:

Gertrude Stein was born in 1874, Allegheny, Pennsylvania. When she was 3 her parents, of German-Jewish origin, moved the family to Vienna and then to Paris. By age 4 they were living in Oakland, California, where she lived until moving East for university studies. In 1903 Stein (far left) moved to Paris, and remained abroad for 30 years. With San Francisco-born Alice B. Toklas (near left; in the middle is the couple's poodle, Basket) Stein established a salon at their home and helped the careers of artists ranging from Djuna Barnes to Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso. Stein's own writing has been likened to cubist paintings. Her poem America, which demonstrates both her modernist style and a bit of her transnational turn, is reprinted below.
All this month, your poet/ry nominees are most welcome!



(credit for middle image, 1927 photo of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, protesting the planned execution of Sacco and Vanzetti)