—: Life :—
You may enthrone your heart In the petals Of a rosebud, Or form with it the nucleus Of a snowball; Inevitably Both will perish.
Louise Stedman Bostick (1891-1922)
P: The Lyric West (1921+), The Alphi Phi Quarterly (1922+), Sunset (1922); C: Poems (1923), etc.
Attended Syracuse University, belonged to the Alpha Phi sorority, where she met Maner Hart Bostick, and they were married in 1911 at Niagara Falls. The marriage appears to have been kept secret from their families, and in 1916 they remarried publicly in Singapore. Bostick died shortly after in 1919; following this, Stedman began publishing poetry, but sadly contracted tuberculosis and died in 1922, at the age of 31. (read more)
“There are songs of varying degrees of beauty, delicacy, and emotion, but those in the tiny volume of Louise Stedman Bostick's Poems compel one to recognize the sincerity, the loveliness, the fortitude of her song. One listens eagerly to catch the next note, yet reluctantly hears the former ones die. Perhaps the realization that the impetus to sing seemed to come from deep suffering, has made those who knew and loved Louise, feel with deeper intensity the spontaneity and the truth of each lyric.” (Dela K. Hilfinger, The Alpha Phi Quarterly, 1924)
A crystalline poem. The river thaws: refracting words. The precision of the images, the dull thwack of the final moment: everything perishes. Everything. Lines of light connecting every moment to every other, unravelling . . .
For Louise Stedman Bostick by Dick Whyte the sun (& whatever the sun knows) glints & gleams: singing the shadows in and out of belonging
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