WHILE ONE STAR IN THE CONSTELLATION of women poets is rising, as noted elsewhere in this department, another went to its setting.

Miss Edith M. Thomas, whose verse appeared on occasions in our poetry page, died September 12 at the age of 71. Miss Thomas had for some years been connected with Harper’s Magazine, and she was active in this employ until almost the day of her death. She had published fourteen volumes of verse; not large, to be sure, as verse that comes of inspiration and not manufacture, is bound to be. Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, in a letter to the New York Times, gives an appreciation that is best quoted almost in full:

“For nearly half a century, with an almost nunlike seclusion, she devoted herself to her chosen art. She had everything that goes to make enduring verse—a rare imagination that seldom fell to fancy; an exquisite sense of rhythm, vibrant and flexible; unfailing taste, noble standards of thought and expression, and what is becoming rarer in our verse, pervading spirituality. She was never academic in the objectionable sense of that word, being saved from such coldness by the warmth of her sympathies, and yet she was perhaps the most classical of the poets of her later years. She was, however, for one who wrote so much, one of the least known. Her slender volumes made little appeal to a public eager for novelties, and not a single quotation from her is cited in The Evening Post’s symposium of fine lines printed the day before she died. I count it much to the credit of the New York Times that her beautiful and original lines were so often found upon its editorial page, but even these do not show the range of her Muse. She had a penetrating and sympathetic feeling for nature, and interpreted it with surprizing flashes of revelation amounting to ‘second sight.’ Never boisterous, she often had what I may call a subdued boldness of expression that gave her the stamp of a discoverer. Her sonnets had distinction and virility. Those who found her lacking in emotion should read her philippics on the World War. The tenderness of her poems on children and on the dying Keats is, I venture to say, unsurpassed by her contemporaries of English verse. She lived a life of sacrifice to her art and once wrote with the accent of greatness: ’0 poverty, if thou and I must wed, I’ll surely try to sing thee into fame.’ Now that this beautiful spirit has gone into history, every school and college of the land should study her verse as a part of its regular curriculum, if for no other reason than to show, in these days of the loud pedal in everything, that the kingdom of poetry is not taken by violence.”

Her biography, as the press presents it, is not full of incident, but is a record of quiet scholarly pursuit:

“Miss Thomas was born at Chatham, Ohio. From her early days she was interested in poetry and the classics, and the classical note was perhaps the dominating one in her work. At the Normal Institute in Geneva she helped secure special classes in Greek for herself and two other girls. The present of a volume of Keats from an uncle widened her imaginative horizon and decided the form, the sonnet, into which she molded the greater portion of her poetry.

“Seeking a craft by which she could earn her living, if neces-sary, she chose type-setting, and by it earned her first $40. Some years after her removal to this city she remarked to a friend, speaking of her first sensations here: ‘I was drunk with New York.’ Visits to Boston and Europe led to friendships with American and foreign writers, among them William Dean Howells, Mrs. James T. Fields and Edmund Gosse.

“She was a member of the Greek-American Association and an occasional contributor to several Greek-American newspapers. She was one of the readers for the Century Dictionary, a work she declared to be a privilege rather than a task, since it meant so much delving among the poets in the old Astor Library, to verify quotations. In 1908, during the editorship of Henry Mills Alden, she became associated with Harper’s Magazine, and continued her editorial duties until two days before her death.”

Source: The Literary Digest of October 10, 1925