Josephine Preston Peabody was an American poet and dramatist. She was also an English teacher.
Background
Josephine Preston Peabody was born on May 30, 1874 in Brooklyn, New York City, United States. She was the second child of Charles Kilham and Susan Josephine Morrill Peabody and a descendant of Francis Peabody who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1635. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent her first ten years there and in New York City. A younger sister died, an older by five years was her close companion. The parents gave unusual attention to their children's education. The father, of artistic tastes and interests, implanted in them his keen delight in the theatre, especially in Shakespeare, and trained them in the appreciation of music and poetry. The mother laid stress, in daily details, upon beauty. These early years surrounded her sensitive nature with nobility of feeling, with harmony and with joy. But the lack of these was also to share in her growth. At Charles Peabody's death in 1884 the saddened widow took the children to live in Dorchester, Massachussets.
Josephine Preston Peabody read six hundred books between 1888 and 1893. These are poetry, novels, essays, history, philosophy and drama. But her's was a creative mind, not content alone with reading.
Education
In 1894 - 1895 and 1895 - 1896, Josephine Preston Peabody was aided to study at Radcliffe College. Here she was stimulated by instruction by Harvard University professors. She was especially influenced by study of Dante, by the Miracle and Morality plays, and by the Elizabethan drama. She now found congenial friends. These were years of rapid artistic growth.
Career
In 1894 Josephine Preston Peabody's poem was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly, and a helpful friendship began with Horace Scudder, its editor. His advice, critical yet encouraging, influenced her to prune her work, to demand of herself lucidity and exactitude. Her first volume of poetry The Wayfarers was published in 1898. Her poems now appeared frequently in the leading magazines. Evidence of such a gift in one so young brought much publicity and many new friends. Her loveliness of form and face: slender, child-like, with beauty of feature and radiance in expression, increased the admiration for her achievement. Few guessed the depression, the physical weakness, and the family anxieties, that weighed her down. Only in her diary are these evident, as are the power of her spiritual life and her urge for poetic expression. In the next eight years, under these difficult conditions and with the addition of a lectureship in poetry and English literature at Wellesley College (1901 - 1903), she wrote and published the following poems and plays: Fortune and Men's Eyes (1900), Marlowe (1901), The Singing Leaves (1903), and Pan, A Choric Idyl (1904), a "Novello, " with musical setting, produced at a state farewell concert to Lord and Lady Minto at Ottawa, Canada.
In 1908 Josephine Preston Peabody published The Book of the Little Past and in 1909 The Piper. In 1910 The Piper won the Stratford Play Competition against three hundred and fifteen competitors and was produced at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, on July 26, 1910. It was played in London and over England, and was produced at the New Theatre, in New York, on January 30, 1911. Contemporaneous with these was her growing concern for conditions of labor, expressed in The Singing Man. She shared in that aroused sense of social responsibility and warmth of feeling characteristic of this period in the United States. In 1912 The Wings was produced at the Toy Theatre, Boston. In 1913, The Wolf of Gubbio was published. In 1914, she was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa and gave the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Tufts College.
In 1916 Harvest Moon was published. Through these and the following years, her gallant spirit and her urge for expression of beauty in poetic form were increasingly engaged in a losing fight with pain and with the insidious and unrecognized hardening of the minute arteries that feed the brain, which brought her death. In 1921 she contributed a Song for the Pilgrim Women for the Plymouth Pageant. Portrait of Mrs. W. , a play in prose, was published in 1922, a few months before her death on December 4, 1922. Her artistic development was from lyrical to dramatic poetry. Her artistic development was from lyrical to dramatic poetry. Her keen interest in metrical design and in symbolism was increasingly subjected to the desire for limpid expression, clear to the general reader, and for dramatic form. With a few companions in her art, she kept alive a passing tradition - the poetic drama.
Josephine Preston Peabody took active part in the movement for woman's suffrage, finally joining the Woman's Party.
Views
Quotations:
"One never learns by success. Success is the plateau that one rests upon to take breath and look down from upon the straight and difficult path, but one does not climb upon a plateau. "
"An ideal's love-fraught, imperious call
That bides the spheres become articulate. "
"One does not expect in this world; one hopes and pays carfares. "
Membership
Josephine Preston Peabody was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Connections
In 1906 Josephine Preston Peabody married Lionel Simeon Marks, of the engineering department at Harvard University. Her artistic self-expression came to its full development in this happy marriage and in motherhood. They had two children together, a boy and a girl.