Helen Bevington
Helen Smith Bevington (1906–2001) was an American poet, prose author, and educator.
Bevington was born in Afton, New York. Bevington was reared in Worcester, New York where her father was a Methodist minister. Bevington attended the University of Chicago and earned a degree in philosophy. She proceeded to write a thesis about Thoreau, earning a master’s degree in English from Columbia University.In 1928, she married Merle M. Bevington (1900–64). The couple travelled abroad, returning in 1929 in response to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Both Bevingtons taught English at Duke University starting in the 1940s, Helen retiring in 1976.
In addition to her 12 books of poetry and essays, Bevington's work appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorkerand The American Scholar. Bevington was a poet, a diarist, and an essayist. She was also a winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry (1956) and the Mayflower Cup (1974) both given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association;[3] and the North Carolina Award for Literature (1973). Charley Smith's Girl (1965) was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.
(from Wikipedia)
“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
“It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.”