And The Legacy Illinois Left Upon Her
“Ruth Stone, a poet who wrote in relative obscurity until receiving the National Book Award at the age of 87 for her collection In the Next Galaxy, died on Nov. 19 at her home in Ripton, Vt. She was 96. Her death was announced [last] Tuesday by her daughter Abigail Stone,” the New York Times reports.
“A quietly respected poet who wrote in rural solitude, Ms. Stone became something of a public figure when news of her award was announced in November 2002 and press accounts drew attention to her unusual life story of struggle and belated acclaim, dominated by the suicide of her poet husband in 1959.”
Walter Stone was a graduate student at the University of Illinois when they met.
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“By age 19, Stone was married and had moved to Urbana, Ill., studying at the University of Illinois,” AP recalls. “There, she met Walter Stone, a graduate student and poet who became the love of her life, well after his ended. ‘You, a young poet working/in the steel mills; me, married, to a dull chemical engineer,’ she wrote of their early, adulterous courtship, in the poem ‘Coffee and Sweet Rolls.’
“She divorced her first husband, married Stone and had two daughters (she also had a daughter from her first marriage). By 1959, he was on the faculty at Vassar and both were set to publish books. But on a sabbatical in England, Walter Stone hung himself, at age 42, a suicide his wife never got over or really understood.”
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From an interview with Modern American Poetry:
MA: Where did your anger with men come from? How old were you?
RS: I was older, when Walter died, I finally woke up to what was going on. I was in Illinois teaching and a bunch of us bought out a magazine and put women’s writing into it. I must have been 44, I was 42 when he died.
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“In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she had to raise three daughters alone, all the time writing what she called her love poems, all written to a dead man who forced her to ‘reside in limbo’ with her daughters.”
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“A different way to think about genius.”
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In The Next Galaxy.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on November 29, 2011