Marguerite Vivian Young was an American author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Her work evinced an interest in the American identity, social issues, and environmentalism.
Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities.
Angel in the Forest was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.
Marguerite Young's epic novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.
Perhaps like me your life was changed by MMMD. I bought the only copy I could find of moderate fable under $100 and just finished rereading it. They are not nearly as rare as Prismatic Ground.
What to say? Original poems and several reprints from such publications as Kenyon Review, Accent, Southern Review, et al. It’s poetry about “the copulation of men with space.” No reviews? Piss-poor ratings without a hint as to why? If you open a book of poems and are disappointed, that’s your problem. But I will say it is more valuable to me as One of Marguerite’s Books than it is as a Book of Poetry. Her early verse, a good introduction to her trademark paradoxical pluralism, merely invites the muses to the later blossoming of Miss MacIntosh, the bald imposter, but there are some real great couplets and quatrains here free for epigraph-plundering by some ambitious young novelist. Such that have stuck with me:
“And the lean crow buried by sexton beetles Is from the mating of stars, a strange result.”
or
“For rarity precedes extinction as sickness Comes before death, there is weariness within The perfection of the shell, and the perfect bird Never will be born.”
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN BEEN PRODUCED IN FULL COMPLIANCE WITH THE GOVERNMENT’S REGULATIONS FOR CONSERVING PAPER AND OTHER ESSENTIAL MATERIALS. (1944)
I’m a big fan of Marguerite Young’s poetry & had been reading & enjoying this work for years. So I’m here to announce the good news that this book will be included in Marguerite Young’s “Collected Poems”, ed. Joshua Rothes, Phil Bevis, & myself, published jointly by Chatwin Books & Sublunary Editions, both of Seattle, WA. The release date is Oct 4, 2022.