'Anna Wickham (1883-1947) was one of the most important female poets writing in English during the first half of the twentieth century. A pioneer of Modernist poetry, she was also a fierce feminist, social activist, and friend of many significant writers, including D.H.
'Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Katherine Mansfield, Natalie Clifford Barney, Kate O'Brien, and Lawrence Durrell. She produced a unique, daring and influential body of work while living a dramatic, often tragic life, which ended with her suicide. During her lifetime, Wickham published two plays in Australia, five collections of poetry in England, and one book of poetry in the United States. She lived in Australia, England and France. Wickham's work has frequently been anthologised in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Wickham's transnational, unconventional life provided her with a unique worldview; she drew heavily on her own experiences in her poetry while interrogating conceptions of gender roles, marriage, motherhood, sexuality and class.
'While Wickham's poetry earned her a major reputation during her lifetime, and her most famous poems continue to be anthologised, most of her published work is out of print and the majority of her poems have never been published. New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham is the first collection of Wickham's poetry to be published in over three decades. This collection republishes one hundred of Wickham's poems selected from the collections published during her lifetime, as well as poems from Selected Poems (1971) and The Writings of Anna Wickham (1984). In addition to bringing many of Wickham's greatest poems back into print, this collection publishes one hundred and fifty of Wickham's remarkable poems for the first time, significantly expanding her body of published work and demonstrating her significant poetic achievement.' (Publication summary)
'Anna Wickham was one of the most important female poets writing in English during the first half of the twentieth century. A pioneer of modernist poetry, she was also a fierce feminist, social activist, and friend and mentor to a transnational community of artists, including D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harold Monro, Katherine Mansfield, Natalie Clifford Barney, Kate O'Brien, Lawrence Dun-ell and John Gawsworth. She produced a unique, daring and influential body of work while living a dramatic, often tragic life, which ended with her suicide in 1947 at the age of sixty-three. During her lifetime, Wickham published two plays in Australia, five books of poetry in England, and one book of poetry in the United States. She lived in Australia, England and France, and travelled as far afield as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Her poems were published widely in literary journals and newspapers, earning her a major transnational reputation. Wickham's work has frequently been anthologised in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. ' (Introduction)
'Devotees of Australian literature are unlikely to possess more than a half-dozen single volumes by poets born before Federation, and their reading of such poets is generally limited to anthologies. The problem, I’d suggest, is one of availability more than desire. University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP) is one publisher looking to redress this through an intermittent series of titles, which include Lesbia Harford’s Collected Poems (2014) and the Collected Verse of John Shaw Neilson (2012), together with more recent classics, such as Francis Webb’s Collected Poems (2011) and the Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewitt (2010). UWAP’s latest volume is the elegantly produced New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, edited and introduced by Australian-born, poet-scholar Nathanael O’Reilly, which republishes 100 poems from Wickham’s five collections together with another 150 previously uncollected poems.' (Introduction)
'Anna Wickham was one of the most important female poets writing in English during the first half of the twentieth century. A pioneer of modernist poetry, she was also a fierce feminist, social activist, and friend and mentor to a transnational community of artists, including D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harold Monro, Katherine Mansfield, Natalie Clifford Barney, Kate O'Brien, Lawrence Dun-ell and John Gawsworth. She produced a unique, daring and influential body of work while living a dramatic, often tragic life, which ended with her suicide in 1947 at the age of sixty-three. During her lifetime, Wickham published two plays in Australia, five books of poetry in England, and one book of poetry in the United States. She lived in Australia, England and France, and travelled as far afield as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Her poems were published widely in literary journals and newspapers, earning her a major transnational reputation. Wickham's work has frequently been anthologised in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. ' (Introduction)
'A fierce social activist and feminist, her life both tragic and seemingly enlightened, Wickham boasts a body of work that reveals to us hundreds of glass shards that magnify and reflect the internal life of women and the existential grief of humanity. In "Reverie," however, our speaker breaks from such formal structures and challenges the very notion of poetic form by challenging the status quo for female poets and artists through enjambment and a loose, flowing rhyme structure. Having come out on the other side of Wickham's work feeling more certain that being a grown woman means experiencing loss and uncertainty, I appreciate her inclination toward a work ethic that fills the space from which the things we love eventually and always escape.' (Publication abstract)
'Anna Wickham made a distinctive contribution to the poetic experiments of the early twentieth century'
'At the age of ten, Anna Wickham (1883–1947), born Edith Alice Mary Harper, promised her father that she would become a poet. She made the promise in Wickham Terrace in Brisbane, where her family lived for a period after emigrating from London. She later adopted the pseudonym ‘Anna Wickham’ in honour of this moment. Wickham’s life was strikingly transnational. She departed Australia in 1904 to study opera singing in London and Paris, and shared friendships with many prominent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Dylan Thomas. Her husband, Patrick Hepburn, opposed her writing. In 1913, he had Wickham incarcerated in an asylum for several months, during which she wrote eighty more poems. By the time of her death by suicide in 1947, Wickham had written over 1,400 poems. Her work suffered some critical neglect in traditional accounts of literary modernism; however, critics are now beginning to recognise her as a significant modernist and feminist poet.' (Introduction)
'Anna Wickham made a distinctive contribution to the poetic experiments of the early twentieth century'
'A fierce social activist and feminist, her life both tragic and seemingly enlightened, Wickham boasts a body of work that reveals to us hundreds of glass shards that magnify and reflect the internal life of women and the existential grief of humanity. In "Reverie," however, our speaker breaks from such formal structures and challenges the very notion of poetic form by challenging the status quo for female poets and artists through enjambment and a loose, flowing rhyme structure. Having come out on the other side of Wickham's work feeling more certain that being a grown woman means experiencing loss and uncertainty, I appreciate her inclination toward a work ethic that fills the space from which the things we love eventually and always escape.' (Publication abstract)
'Devotees of Australian literature are unlikely to possess more than a half-dozen single volumes by poets born before Federation, and their reading of such poets is generally limited to anthologies. The problem, I’d suggest, is one of availability more than desire. University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP) is one publisher looking to redress this through an intermittent series of titles, which include Lesbia Harford’s Collected Poems (2014) and the Collected Verse of John Shaw Neilson (2012), together with more recent classics, such as Francis Webb’s Collected Poems (2011) and the Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewitt (2010). UWAP’s latest volume is the elegantly produced New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham, edited and introduced by Australian-born, poet-scholar Nathanael O’Reilly, which republishes 100 poems from Wickham’s five collections together with another 150 previously uncollected poems.' (Introduction)
'Anna Wickham was one of the most important female poets writing in English during the first half of the twentieth century. A pioneer of modernist poetry, she was also a fierce feminist, social activist, and friend and mentor to a transnational community of artists, including D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harold Monro, Katherine Mansfield, Natalie Clifford Barney, Kate O'Brien, Lawrence Dun-ell and John Gawsworth. She produced a unique, daring and influential body of work while living a dramatic, often tragic life, which ended with her suicide in 1947 at the age of sixty-three. During her lifetime, Wickham published two plays in Australia, five books of poetry in England, and one book of poetry in the United States. She lived in Australia, England and France, and travelled as far afield as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Her poems were published widely in literary journals and newspapers, earning her a major transnational reputation. Wickham's work has frequently been anthologised in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. ' (Introduction)
