I know it must be winter (though I sleep)
I know it must be winter, for I dream
I dip my bare feet in the running stream,
And flowers are many, and the grass grows deep.
From “Winter Sleep” by Edith M. Thomas
Edith Matilda Thomas, in the pouring rain, knocked on the
door of the esteemed Helen Hunt Jackson with a
scrapbook in her hand. The “best amateur poet of Ohio”
went to New York with the ambition of widening her
literary world.1 A connection on behalf of her father led
her to the literary salon of Anne C. L. Botta, a highly
regarded salon hostess and artist. Botta’s Waverley Place
home invited and welcomed many popular and elite
authors, musicians, and visual artists and even politicians
and famed entrepreneurs. Her salon is most widely
recognized as the place where Edgar Allan Poe first
recited “The Raven.” It was in this parlor, which was
bursting with lively discussion of art and full of literary
history, that Thomas fell utterly in love with New York
and New York fell just as much in love with her.2
When Thomas entered Jackson’s home, she was met with
a polite but mechanical greeting from Jackson. The young
poet knocking on the door of an established one—asking
for validation or where to find success—was routine at
this late point in Jackson's career. After she reluctantly
turned open the pages of the scrapbook and read through
some of the collection of the rain-soaked poet, she went to
the editorial office at Harper's “with an air of triumph”
and “‘This,’ said she, ‘is something for you to read. See
45what you think of the verses in that book and let me know
if I have not discovered a poet for you.’”3 This unusual
discovery, which led to the practically immediate
publishing of her scrapbook poems, established Edith M.
Thomas among the elite literary circles of New York.
Jessie B. Rittenhouse, a literary critic and journalist, retold
this “origin story” of sorts for the introduction of the
Selected Poems of Edith M. Thomas.
After Thomas's death in 1925, New York Times writer and
poet Robert Underwood Johnson called her “unsurpassed
by her contemporaries of English verse.” And during her
lifetime, and with very few pauses (and those were
primarily to travel back to Ohio to take care of family
members), Thomas published regularly in the Atlantic,
Lippencott's, St Nicholas, and The Century Magazine. She
wrote fifteen poetry collections, many of which were
published by the prestigious Houghton & Mifflin Co. John
Greenleaf Whittier praised, “She has a divine gift [and]
her first book is more than a promise—an assurance.”4
She wrote regularly to Botta, never forgetting her support
and urging Thomas to meet with Jackson. Botta and
Jackson were active and powerful mentors for new women
poets, but none would quite rise to fame as rapidly and as
intensely as Edith M. Thomas.
Botta’s mentorship was praised and recognized (even by
the ever complaining Poe!) and through her decades of
hosting, she connected young poets to editors, other
artists, and would nurture genuine friendship for years and
years.5 While it was not a formal organization, Botta
inspired what would be a network of female friendships
that would carry on traditions of mentorship. For example,
Thomas also was a dear friend to Sarah Orne Jewett and
Annie Fields, both of whom would correspond with her to
workshop poems. The late nineteenth century particularly
saw a rising number of women writers and poets in thepages of influential publications. Thomas made her living
off of her work as an editor at Harper's Magazine and, of
course, her poetry. She spent her years living in New York
entirely braided into the literary scene, making a name for
herself and not forgetting to make new space for women
who could not enter its threshold as easily as their male
peers.
Thomas’s footprint in literary history would fade and slip
away, like the many women poets’ of the nineteenth
century, out of cultural memory. She’d be referenced
sporadically in a select few anthologies but was almost
entirely left out of scholarship—an aspect of her legacy
that Paul Bernat Bennett smartly examined and questioned
in her brief biography of Thomas included in her
anthology, Nineteenth Century Women Poets (1998).
Thomas wrote many realist poems, a genre that was
cusped between the Romantic period and Modernism, that
has only recently been revitalized in scholarship. Bennett
questioned the necessity of remembering realists like
Thomas who act as a “bridge” between the Romantic and
Modern poets, she asks, “Having served its purpose, need
the bridge be remembered?” (Bennett 294).
But in the past couple of decades, realist poetry is
emerging slowly as its own category to step out of the
shadow of more recognizable genres. And figures like
Thomas—unsurprisingly, who were also primarily women
poets—see themselves on the pages of literary history
where they should have been all along. When Jesse
Rittenhouse, a good friend of Thomas, assembled the
collection of her poems after her death, the famed poet
Ada Alden wrote in memoriam a poem titled “Psyche’s
Lamp” in which her final stanza called for its readers to
listen:
When the sharp tempests beat,
We will remember her and hear her sing:
47“I shall step lightly forth to meet the spring . . .”
Flooded with love her airy world is ringing;
For hear! above the clouds a skylark singing.
End Notes
1. This title was given to her in an Ohioan
newspaper; in a letter to Botta, Thomas was
clearly irritated by the comment.
2. or more information on her literary salon, please
see: Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta: Written by Her
Friends. New York: J. S. Tait & sons, 1893
3. Rittenhouse, Jessie B. “Edith M. Thomas 1854-
1925.” Harper & Brothers, 1926.
4. This was featured in a letter written to Annie
Fields found in the The Sarah Orne Jewett Text
Project
5. For example, Elizabeth Renker’s excellent book
Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900
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