Jeremy Ingalls (1911–2000)


"Ingalls saw herself as growing from Emersonian roots, and those of ‘vigorous women like Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller,’ in a New England that valued intellectual pursuit and cross-cultural influences." ―Alison Hawthorne Deming

Jeremy Ingalls was a well-known American poet, scholar, editor and translator. She was born on April 2, 1911 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she attended school and began reading Dante at age 12. At 14 she was devouring Balzac, Goethe, Confucius, Sun Yat Sen, and Nietzsche. She attended Tufts University, earning both a B.A. and an M.A. In 1941, at the age of 30, she won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for her book The Metaphysical Sword and went on to publish 17 books during an active literary career spanning five decades. In addition to being a professor of English, she was also a professor of Asian Studies at Rockford College in Illinois before retiring to Tucson in the early 1960s. Among her many honors and awards, she was a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Fellowship in Asian Studies, a Fulbright Professorship and a Rockefeller Foundation Lectureship in American Poetry in Japan, and an appointment as an Asia Foundation delegate to the Republic of Korea. Her lifelong interest in other cultural traditions was evident in her translations from the Japanese and Chinese, as well as in the fabric of her own work. Her books of poetry include her epic poem Tahl (1945), The Woman from the Island (1958), These Islands Also (1959), and This Stubborn Quantum (1983). Jeremy Ingalls died in Tucson on March 16, 2000.

In 2001 the Poetry Center received, in conjunction with a gift in excess of $1 million from their estates, a donation of poetry books and literary magazines from the personal libraries of Jeremy Ingalls and her editor and lifelong companion Mary Dearing Lewis.

Mary Dearing Lewis was born in Virginia and attended Tufts University and Indiana University, where she received her Ph.D. She taught English with distinction at a number of colleges and universities in the Midwest, including Rockford College, before retiring to Tucson. Dr. Lewis died in November of 2000.

The photograph above was taken by LaVerne H. Clark in 1964.

Poetry, a Magazine of Verse. September 1941.

Among the earliest of Ingalls’s poems to be published were these three poems from the nationally respected journal Poetry. In the same year, these poems were included in her Yale Series of Younger Poets book, The Metaphysical Sword (Yale University Press, 1941).

The Metaphysical Sword. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1941.

Ingalls’s volume The Metaphysical Sword was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by the then–popular and revered Stephen Vincent Benet. In his forward he describes the spiritual nature of Ingalls’s work, praising her originality and uniqueness: "The recognition of the spirit that informs her best work is never divorced from reality. She is able to take such everyday and present symbols as the desks in a dusty schoolroom or the rocks in the seaweed by the tide and make them also part of an act of belief."

Fable of Arrogance

The Fox on Adulation feeds; the word,
The silence, two fat meats to flatter him.
Silence, the fearful silence is his food.
In fulsome silence, “I am Fox!” he cries,
While the Rabbits hide in the hedges,
Blinking and blinking their round, round eyes.

The Woman from the Island. Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1958.

The Woman from the Island is Ingalls’s fullest volume of poetry, containing 74 poems. A broad scope of cultural interests and a spirit of travel and adventure characterize the poems in this volume, many of which had appeared in a variety of magazines, including American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly, Chicago Review, New Republic, and Saturday Review of Literature. Consequently, Ingalls was very widely read and admired throughout the forties and fifties.

The very old poet, she told me:
"At this world’s curve azalea bush and holly
Bloom in a winter sun. The Lord lives gaily."

From "Aesthetics in Winter"

These Islands Also. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959.

Ingalls spent three years in the 1950s as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Japan. The poems in this volume are informed by those years and her observations of life in Japan. The book includes two long poems in which Ingalls engages with Japanese history, as well as a group of haiku, and other shorter poems.

Fumiko

You do not know this dancer.
I have seen her turn
At invisible
Koto, lift a fan
To insubstantial flute—and
Heard
           Clear
                      Tune.

Tahl. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1945.

Ingalls began her epic poem Tahl when she was 20 years old and worked on it for the next 13 years. The poem centers on the young aviator/composer Tahl and includes 20 main characters, 20 minor voices, and 10 choruses. The protagonist is a character belonging to no country, but to all countries. The Cantos of Tahl mix broad historical strokes with the stuff of everyday life. As Alison Hawthorne Deming has said: “The book presents a vision of collective healing and wisdom… Tahl is an unparalleled study in the capacity of poetry to represent the questing spirit of human-kind as it moves and transforms through philosophies, religions, voices and cadences.”

The Epic Tradition and Related Essays. Tucson, Arizona: Capstone Editions, 1989.

Ingalls was captivated by literary history and published her major work, The Epic Tradition, when she was 78 years old (although it was written nearly 40 years earlier). The Epic Tradition is based on the lectures that Ingalls gave at Doshisha University in Kyoto in the summer of 1958. They were also published in East-West Review of 1964–1965. The Epic Tradition is a structural analysis of epic poetry from Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, along with a wide variety of other 20th century works.

Jeremy Ingalls: Selected Poems. Introduction by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Tucson, Arizona: Kore Press, 2007.

This volume includes selections from all of Ingalls’s published books of poetry, except for Tahl and Summer Liturgy, a verse drama. Several of Ingalls’s uncollected poems, written during the last years of her life, are also included:

Child at the Shore

Are there no pilgrims ever any more?
None to swing a staff or stoop to wear
The cockle shell of simply being there?

With driftwood branch she strolls sharp-eyed and there
Stoops and gathers. Many. Everywhere.

Letters, Newspaper Articles, Typescripts, etc.

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