Exiles from a Future Time by Wald Alan M.;

Author:Wald, Alan M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2002-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Sappho in Red

Loyalties

One of the most acclaimed Communist poets lived her intimate life and forged her career as a modern feminist, but in her cultural theory and practice she professed to eschew loyalties based on gender difference. The avowed meager investment of Genevieve Taggard in gender identity is perplexing but not anomalous among the Literary Left. Her poetic credo is concordant with the antiromantic stance of her critical statements:

The reader will misunderstand my poems if he thinks I have been trying to write about myself (as if I were in any way unique) as a biographer might—or as a Romantic poet would, to map his own individuality. Since the earliest attempts at verse I have tried to use the “I” in a poem only as a means of transferring feeling to identification with anyone who takes the poem, momentarily, for his own. “I” is then adjusted to the voice of the reader.1

Yet Taggard did write several poems strictly about female life experiences, such as “To My Mother,” recalling her mother’s domestic labor, and “Proud Day,” about the Black singer Marian Anderson, which begins: “Our sister sang on the Lincoln steps.”2 She also proclaimed forthrightly in the book-jacket blurb of her Collected Poems that “Many poems in this collection are about the experiences of women. I hope these express all types of candid and sturdy women.”3 Taggard’s intricate and perhaps contradictory approach to gender can only be fathomed in the context of the particularities of her personal and political evolution.

Born in Washington State in 1894, Taggard was the eldest of three children whose parents were schoolteachers of Scotch-Irish and French Huguenot lineage. They were pietistic members of the Disciples of Christ Church, and occupied her childhood with the Bible and hymns.4 Until the age of two she lived on an apple farm in Washington, after which her parents moved to Hawaii to work in the public schools and start a missionary program. There, Taggard grew up among children of Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, and Japanese descent, an experience that created a sense of racial equality and community amidst a refined indigence. Her remembrance of this childhood would differ vividly from her experiences on the mainland when the family twice returned for visits to their erstwhile domicile in Washington due to her father’s lung ailment and for economic reasons. The racism and class exploitation she beheld in Washington shaped her impression that she had been momentarily cast out of Eden.5 At the age of thirteen, back in Hawaii, Taggard became engrossed in Keats, writing imitations of his poems. For eighteen years she lived in a setting she would later idealize for its guile-lessness and for the rectitude of her family’s courtly pauperism. Thus her artistic discernment became molded around contrasts branded by repulsive realities (Washington State) and the intimation of a finer life (Hawaii), with her poetry constituting the transit between the two.

In 1914 Taggard was granted a scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Her father was by now

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