Leonie+Adams

Amanda Cohen



__Birth Date:__ 1899 __Died:__ 1988

Leonie Adams was born is Brooklyn, New York and she graduated from Barnard college. Leonie Adams used to be an educator, consultant, editor, and finally a poet. She was best known for her lyric poetry, which had romantic and metaphysical elements. In 1920 she served in capacities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Than she taught English at various colleges and universities. From 1948-49 she was the poetry consultant, for the Library of Congress. In 1974 she was awarded from the Academy of Poets. Adams awards and honors also include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, grants from the National Council of the Arts and The National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award. **Poetry** //Those Not Elect// (1925) //High Falcon and Other Poems// (1929) //This Measure// (1933) //Poems: A Selection// (1954)

THE MYSTERIOUS THING

What plummet, seas, to sound you — All the long reaches spun out silver-white, Turn you and cast drowned riches? Or how again, O velvet night, When the sky, stooping with its glittering load, About the elf-locks of the curious grass Scatters its sparklings, will you part almost Upon the quintessential host?

Or how the figment spirit, sleeping, Can it render body, ghost, In its dream unseat the heavy monarch, Conjure to the bleak wild coast Its sunk, its deep delight, Its night and mist divide, recall how flitting Above the pallid thing, Joy has an azure wing?

~ Léonie Adams (1899-1988), American poet and editor

 = This Severing = I turned as new resigned:

A summer gleaned, my business was within,

My charge the sober mind,

My care the wintry bin.

And found the boughs in stain,

Past-promise-hued. O not

Before, earnest as rich was yet so plain;

A harvest was ungot.

Beech drenching down my pathway goldenheart,

Ash, pensive light-cheek rose,

Both pluck the thought apart,

And meant you, heart, to close?

So fell the doomed farewells;

So, so looked forth a thing:

Regret, reproach, what else

Must baffle, vex, beguile this severing ||