Rosemary Thomas (poet)

Rosemary Thomas (16 February 1901 – 7 April 1961) was an American poet and teacher.

Education

Thomas graduated from Smith College in 1923. In 1950 she received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University for an essay on Lawrence Durrell, the British poet and novelist.[1]

She taught creative writing at various schools including Spence School and Brearley School in New York, Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and Oxford School in Hartford, Connecticut.[1]

Literary career

Her poems were published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and in other magazines.[1][2]

In 1951, Thomas won the Twayne First Book Contest for her only book of poems, Immediate Sun.[3] The book had a foreword written by Archibald MacLeish, who described her poems as having "a common quality, a characteristic idiom, and inflection the reader would recognize again as a man recognizes the inflection of a decisive voice".[4] The book includes a poem about her brother-in-law, Canadian tennis star J.F. Foulkes, entitled The Colonel.[5]

The final years of her life, which she devoted entirely to her writing, were divided between her homes in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and New York City, where she died in 1961.[4]

Legacy

A posthumous collection of her poems was published in 1968, titled Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas, with a foreword by Mark van Doren. He wrote: "Rosemary Thomas's poems will last, as all things excellent do, for the simple reason that nothing like them exists elsewhere."[4]

In 2004, her poem The Elephants Pass Carnegie Hall was set to music by composer David Leisner in his piece A Timeless Procession. It was first performed in 2011 at Symphony Space in New York City.[6][7] The program for the performance records that Leisner discovered Thomas's poems by chance at a library book sale in the late 1980's. He describes her as a "lyrical, imaginative, spiritual-minded poet whose work simply begged me to set it to music".[8]

The English Language and Literature Department at Smith College awards the 'Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize' annually to the best poem or group of poems.[9]

References
  1. "Rosemary Thomas, Poet and Teacher". New York Times. 6 April 1961. Retrieved 7 October 2020. (subscription required)
  2. "Search - Rosemary Thomas". New Yorker. Retrieved 7 October 2020.
  3. "Poetry Prize Awarded: Rosemary Thomas Wins Twayne First Book Contest". New York Times. 10 January 1951. Retrieved 7 October 2020. (subscription required)
  4. Thomas, Rosemary (1968). Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas. New York: Twayne Publishers.
  5. Thomas, Rosemary (1951). Immediate Sun. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. p. 49.
  6. "Rosemary Thomas". Song of America. Retrieved 7 October 2020.
  7. "Classical Music/Opera Listings for March 18-24". New York Times. 17 March 2011. Retrieved 7 October 2020.
  8. "A Timeless Procession". Song of America. Retrieved 7 October 2020.
  9. "Prizes & Awards". Smith College. Retrieved 7 October 2020.
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