I have always been amazed that Anna Wickham's poetry is not more widely known in America. Few popular anthologies contain any of her verses. She doesn't rate a mention in the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English or Benet's Readers Encyclopedia. And no publisher has ever seen fit to put out a Collected Works of Anna Wickham, although there is an out-of-print book entitled The Writings of Anna Wickham, published in 1984 by Virago Press in London, which contains an excellent assortment of her poems.

Early this year, Madison Books brought out a biography of her entitled Anna Wickham, A Poet's Daring Life, by Jennifer Vaughan Jones. But it doesn't appear to have sold in great numbers, and contains only a few of her verses.

In any case, I find her relative obscurity odd, not only because I like her poetry so much, but because I am surprised that at some point during the past several decades the feminist movement didn't discover her work and introduce it to the American public. For Anna Wickham was, above all, an original feminist, who stubbornly rebelled against the role that her husband and society expected her to fill as a mother and wife. And no woman, to my knowledge, has used the medium of poetry to write so amusingly, movingly and artistically about this struggle.

Briefly stated, Anna Wickham is a pseudonym for Edith Alice Mary Harper. She was born in Australia, moved to London in 1905 to study singing, went to Paris to be coached for Opera by Jean de Reszke, but in 1906 she married Patrick Hepburn, a distinguished and wealthy solicitor and Secretary of the London Astronomical Society, by whom she had four sons.

Shortly after they married, Anna began to write poetry. Patrick found it threatening and continuously objected. They had fierce arguments, and in 1913 he had her forcibly committed to a mental hospital, where she wrote even more poetry. She stayed there for 16 weeks, and when the doctors released her, she came out swinging. She joined the suffrage movement, made friends in the literary community, and began publishing her poems.

In 1926, she and Patrick separated and she moved to Paris, where, according to the dust jacket of her recent biography, "she met her muse and lifelong-albeit unrequited - love, Natalie Clifford Barney, the lesbian American millionairess." She lived among the literati in Europe for a number of years, but returned to London during the war, and in 1947 committed suicide.

I have decided to go with two of her poems, rather than just one, as is my custom. No reason. I just thought you'd enjoy both of them.