Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948): The Hawaiian Background of a Proletarian Poet

May 1, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Henke 325 Add to Calendar

Genevieve Taggard is well known for her 1920s lyric poems, and lesser known for her proletarian 'workers' poetry (criticized by mainstream literary critics as “too propagandistic”) that she began to write in the mid-1930s New York, in the height of the Depression. I believe, though, that her strong social commitment was largely formed by her childhood in Hawai‘i, and the strong moral and social conscience she developed as the daughter of progressive reformist Christian parents in a mixed-race community. Although after about 1923 she stopped writing poems on Hawaiian subjects, in 1946 she started again in her last book before she died, titled Origin: Hawaii. I will discuss a couple of these last poems, both lyrical and politically inflected, that I argue represent some of her best work.

Anne Hammond (BFA, UH Mānoa; DPhil, Oxford) grew up in Kailua, Hawai‘i, and has lived in Oxford, England since 1986. She was co-editor of History of Photography journal from 1990 to 2000, and the author of Frederick H. Evans (1992) and Ansel Adams: Divine Performance (2002). In 2011 she received a fellowship to study the papers of poet Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948) at the New York Public Library, and is now engaged on a book-length study of her life and work.


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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