5-6-42 AR ALTHOUGH in 1904, in "The Younger American Poets,”1 Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse defined with clarity and acumen the view taken of Louise Imogen Guiney as a poet in her native America, and though the author of "The Road to Castaly" has lately paid to her friend's memory the tribute of a vivid, loving, and brilliant sketch,2 much yet remains to be said on both sides of the Atlantic. When, shortly after Miss Guiney's death, I endeavoured in the Dublin Review of January, 1921, to define the qualities for which her work had gained swift recognition in the United States even in her girlhood, and won and kept the admiration of an audience fit though few in the British Empire, I received letters of enquiry from numerous responsive readers, some of whom declared that the very name of Louise Imogen Guiney had been totally unknown to them, and the poems quoted by me had therefore all the attraction of a new discovery. And yet so far back as the 'nineties in England, Andrew Lang drew attention to her merits as an essayist; Dr. Edmund Gosse, Dr. Garnett, William Sharpe, Lionel Johnson, Herbert Clarke and Clement Shorter admired her poetry; while from Ireland came the praise of Katharine Tynan (Mrs. Harry Hinkson), Dr. Sigerson, and others whose own literary attainments made their words authoritative. The reasons why her name suffered a temporary eclipse in England, or indeed was never as widely known as it deserved, will be made manifest in the following study of her life-work. 1 Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Chap. IV. pp. 75-93. "Louise Imogen Guiney," by Alice Brown. The Macmillan Company, 1921, pp. III. Out of a succession of books, ranging from “Songs at the Start" in 1884 to Happy Ending," published nearly five years prior to the Great War, only one 1 is now obtainable; so a representative selection is offered here, with supplementary illustrative matter from a wide range of letters; also a descriptive Bibliography, the compilation of which was no easy task, for not even Louise Guiney herself possessed a complete set of her own early publications, some of which are of extreme rarity. Inasmuch as I recognised her genius at least ten years before she became a regular correspondent and intimate friend, her cousin and literary executor, Miss Grace Guiney, has invited me to undertake the present critical and biographical summary, believing that I combine in a requisite degree the impartiality of a general reader with the personal sympathy of one who in recent years had opportunities of knowing how consistently the writer of "The Knight Errant " lived up to her own standard. Her friends have given me lavish choice of unpublished material, and so far as possible I have endeavoured to reveal her through her own words, allowing myself only such commentary and explanation as are necessary to elucidate her standpoint and to make a coherent whole. There may be some to whom she will be uncongenial: but I venture to hope they can neither be many nor eminent; for in her combined classical and romantic feeling, her grace, her charm, her ready humour, and, above all, her absolute sincerity, Louise Imogen Guiney will speak to the hearts of all who have in themselves a spark of kinship with her high and noble spirit and her faithful love of truth and beauty. YOKES COURT, NEAR SITTINGBOURNE, KENT, Easter, 1922. E. M. TENISON. 1 "Blessed Edmund Campion." 2nd edition : Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 28 Orchard Street, London. ? See Note of Acknowledgment, pp. xi-xii. |