Léonie Adams
Léonie Adams was an esteemed American poet born on December 9, 1899, in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College in 1922, where her early poem “April Mortality” was published, marking the beginning of her literary career. Adams worked as an editor at various institutions, including Wilson Publishing Company and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while continuing her poetry writing. Her first collection, *Those Not Elect*, published in 1925, received critical acclaim, leading to a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed her to engage with the vibrant literary scene in Paris.
Adams's subsequent works, including *High Falcon, and Other Poems*, further established her reputation, noted for their lyric intensity and mature beauty. Throughout her career, she taught at prestigious institutions, including New York University and Columbia University, and was elected to the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1948. Over her lifetime, she received numerous awards for her contributions to poetry, such as the Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Shelley Memorial Award. Adams is recognized as one of the finest lyric poets of the early 20th century, with her work celebrated for its complexity and beauty. She passed away in 1988, leaving behind a lasting legacy in American literature.
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Léonie Adams
Poet
- Born: December 9, 1899
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
- Died: June 27, 1988
- Place of death: New Milford, Connecticut
Biography
Léonie Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 9, 1899, to lawyer Charles Frederic and Henrietta Rozier Adams. One of six children, Adams led a quiet and protected childhood. When she was eighteen, Adams attended Barnard College, graduating magna cum laude in 1922. While still a student, she sent the poem “April Mortality” to The New Republic, which published the poem.
After graduation, Adams began working as an editor, first at Wilson Publishing Company, where she worked until 1926. She continued writing poetry during this time, publishing her collection, Those Not Elect, in 1925. In 1926, Adams moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she also edited. Her poetry came to the attention of critics Louis Untermeyer and Allen Tate. On the strength of the well-received Those Not Elect, Adams received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1928, allowing her to travel to Paris, where she lived with Tate and his family. While in Paris, Adams immersed herself in the literary community, attending parties given by writers Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. During this time she wrote her second volume of poetry, High Falcon, and Other Poems, published in 1929. These first books won high praise for Adams, with reviewers noting their lyric intensity and formal, mature beauty.
In 1930, Adams returned to New York and began a long and varied teaching career, starting at New York University. In New York, she met and married critic William E. Troy. They were married for twenty-eight years, until his death in 1961. Adams’s third volume of poetry, This Measure, appeared in the same year as her marriage. After teaching a year at Sarah Lawrence College in 1933 and 1934, Adams and her husband moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she taught at Bennington College until 1945, when the couple returned to New York. They built a home in Connecticut, and Adams began her twenty-one-year career at Columbia University.
Elected to the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress (a position later designated as “Poet Laureate”) in 1948, Adams began to write and collect the poems that would appear in her final volume, Poems: A Selection, in 1954. In 1949, Adams became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She ultimately retired from teaching in the 1970’s, choosing to live in her Connecticut home. She died in 1988.
Adams received several important awards for her poetry, including the Shelley Memorial Award in 1954 (which she shared jointly with fellow poet Louise Bogan), the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1955, and the Brandeis University Poetry Medal in 1969. She was also awarded prestigious Fulbright, Academy of American Poets, and National Commission on Arts fellowships. That Adams’s reputation as a poet rests on only four books speaks to the strength of her work. Critics consider her to be one of the finest lyric poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Although her poems are often characterized as difficult in their complexity and formality, they are also high prized for their beauty and unusual diction.