Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff

Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (1888–1959) was an American poet.

Blanche Wagstaff, from a 1918 publication.

Life

Born in Manhattan, Wagstaff spent much of her life in New York City. She began writing at age 7, and had sold her first poem, to Town & Country, by age 16.[1] In 1905 her portrait was painted by the French artist Théobald Chartran. She served for a time as the associate editor of The International,[2] a magazine founded by her close friend George Sylvester Viereck, whose sensual, decadent verse mirrored Wagstaff's. She praised his work, although the two had a falling out over Viereck's support of Germany in the first World War, later reconciling in 1924.[1] Her verse often dealt with sensual and classical themes, and twelve of her poems were anthologized in T.R. Smith's 1921 erotic verse collection Poetica Erotica.[3][4] Her 1944 book for children, The Beloved Son, was a life of Jesus in verse.

Reception

H. L. Mencken praised Wagstaff's poetic drama Alcestis for its "constant novelty and ingenuity of epithet", though he thought at times she let "her adjectives run riot".[5]

Works

Notes
  1. "Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff". ViereckProject. 2014. Archived from the original on March 13, 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-13.
  2. The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems. Page 314. M. Kennerley, 1912.
  3. "From The Book of Love", in T.R. Smith (ed.), Poetica Erotica, Volume 2. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921, pp. 260-263.
  4. "Bacchante", in T.R. Smith (ed.), Poetica Erotica, Volume 2. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921, p. 281.
  5. H. L. Mencken, The Collected Drama of H. L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism, edited by S. T. Joshi (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), p. 217.
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