[New-Poetry] Request for a criticism of '' the Credo'' byMaryAshley Townsend.

[Robin Hamilton]

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From: TheOldMole

The Greenwood Encyclopedia, which is pretty exhaustive, has no entry for 
her.
>>

There is however (inevitably) an entry in Wikipedia for her:

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Mary Ashley Townsend (1832-1901) was an American poet and writer.

She was born in Lyons, New York, about 1836. Her maiden name was Van 
Voorhis. She was educated in her native town and married Gideon Townsend, of 
New Orleans, Louisiana.

She began to write for publication about 1856, and under the pen-name of 
"Xariffa" made a reputation as the author of "Quillotypes," a series of 
humorous papers that appeared in the New Orleans "Delta" and were widely 
copied by the southern and western press. Her other works are "The Brother 
Clerks" (New York, 1859); "Poems" (Philadelphia, 1870); "The Captain's 
Story" (1874); and "Down the Bayou, and other Poems" (Boston, 1884). Her 
most important short poems are "Creed," "A Woman's Wish," "The Bather," and 
"The Wind."

She was officially appointed to deliver the poem on the opening of the New 
Orleans exposition in 1884, and that at the unveiling of the statue of 
General Albert Sidney Johnston in 1887.

[edit] External links
Selected Townsend poems
Works by Mary Ashley Townsend at Project Gutenberg

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-- At that, she gets more fully treated there than:

David Macbeth Moir (January 5, 1798 - July 6, 1851), Scottish physician and 
writer, was born at Musselburgh.

Wiki, while noting his Blackwoods pen name as Delta, fails to indicate that 
he was a prolific writer of poems in the sapphic stanza for that journal. 
These were, admittedly, so atrocious that Moir failed to include them in his 
voluminous Collected Poems (which in turn failed even to achieve the 
distinction of a single reprinting).

As for influences on American women's poetry, it suddenly strikes me to 
wonder whether Dorothy Parker and Edna St Vincent Millay were aware of the 
earlier work of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in England.

Just a thought ...

Robin