Rosemary Thomas (poet)

Thomas graduated from Smith College in 1923. In 1950 she received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University for an essay on Lawrence Durrell, the British poet and novelist.[1]

She taught creative writing at various schools including Spence School and Brearley School in New York, Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and Oxford School in Hartford, Connecticut.[1]

Her poems were published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and in other magazines.[1][2]

In 1951, Thomas won the Twayne First Book Contest for her only book of poems, Immediate Sun.[3] The book had a foreword written by Archibald MacLeish, who described her poems as having "a common quality, a characteristic idiom, and inflection the reader would recognize again as a man recognizes the inflection of a decisive voice".[4] The book includes a poem about her brother-in-law, Canadian tennis star J.F. Foulkes, entitled The Colonel.[5]

The final years of her life, which she devoted entirely to her writing, were divided between her homes in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and New York City, where she died in 1961.[4]

A posthumous collection of her poems was published in 1968, titled Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas, with a foreword by Mark van Doren. He wrote: "Rosemary Thomas's poems will last, as all things excellent do, for the simple reason that nothing like them exists elsewhere."[4]

In 2004, her poem The Elephants Pass Carnegie Hall was set to music by composer David Leisner in his piece A Timeless Procession. It was first performed in 2011 at Symphony Space in New York City.[6][7] The program for the performance records that Leisner discovered Thomas's poems by chance at a library book sale in the late 1980's. He describes her as a "lyrical, imaginative, spiritual-minded poet whose work simply begged me to set it to music".[8]

The English Language and Literature Department at Smith College awards the 'Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize' annually to the best poem or group of poems.[9]

• Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas at Google Books
• Rosemary Thomas papers, 1930-1966 at Columbia University Libraries
• Early Morning Birds, published in the 18 February 1961 issue of the New Yorker
• Lost and Found, published in the 30 May 1959 issue of the New Yorker
• The Elephants Pass Carnegie Hall, published in the 7 May 1955 issue of the New Yorker
• Plymouth at Christmas 1620-1950, published in the 18 December 1954 issue of the New Yorker
• Between Two Worlds, published in the 6 November 1954 issue of the New Yorker