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Elizabeth Daryush

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Elizabeth-daryush

Elizabeth Daryush (1887-1977). Courtesy Poetry by Heart.

Elizabeth Daryush (8 December 1887[1] - 7 April 1977[2]) was an English poet.

Life[]

Daryush was born Elizabeth Bridges, the daughter of Robert Bridges (who would become Poet Laureate); her maternal grandfather was architect Alfred Waterhouse. She had a privileged upbringing in Victorian and Edwardian England. Most of her life was spent in Boars Hill, outside Oxford. Some of her early work was published as Elizabeth Bridges.

She married Ali Akbar Daryush, whom she had met when he was studying at the University of Oxford, and spent some time in Persia.

Besides original poetry, she also wrote translations of classical Persian verse.[2]

Writing[]

Although Daryush followed her father's lead not only in choosing poetry as her life's work but also in the traditional style of poetry she chose to write, the themes of her work are often critical of the upper classes and the social injustice their privilege levied upon others. This characteristic was not present in her early work, including her first two books of poems, published under the name Elizabeth Bridges, which appeared while she was still in her twenties. According to John Finlay, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Daryush's "early poetry is preoccupied with rather conventional subject matter and owes a great deal to the Edwardians."

Daryush took her father's experiment in syllabic verse a step farther by making it less experimental; whereas Bridges' syllable count excluded elidable syllables, producing some variation in the total number of pronounced syllables per line, Daryush's was strictly aural, counting all syllables actually sounded when the poem was read aloud. It is for her successful experiments with syllabic meter that Daryush is best known to contemporary readers,as exampled in her poem "Accentedal" in the quaternion form.

Beyond its social content, Daryush's work is also recognized for a consistent and well-defined personal vision. As Finlay noted, "For her ... poetry always dealt with the `stubborn fact' of life as it is, and the only consolations it offered were those of understanding and a kind of half-Christian, half-stoical acceptance of the inevitable." However, he also argued that Daryush's best poems transcend such fatalism, "dealing with the moral resources found in one's own being ... and a recognition of the beauties in the immediate, ordinary world around us."

Critical reputation[]

The Orlando Project of the University of Cambridge says of Daryush: "[S]he has been praised to the skies by several eminent (male) poets and critics, but almost entirely ignored both by the reading public in general, the leaders of orthodox critical opinion, and the older and newer generations of feminist critics."[2]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

  • Charitessi 1911 (as "Elizabeth Bridges"). Cambridge, UK: Bowes, 1912.
  • Verses by Elizabeth Bridges. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Booksellers, 1916.
  • Sonnets from Hafez, and other verses (1921 as "Elizabeth Bridges"). London: Oxford University Press, 1921.
  • First Book Verses. London: Oxford University Press, 1930.
  • Second Book Verses. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.
  • Third Book Verses. London: Oxford University Press, 1933.
  • Fourth Book Verses. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.
  • Selected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1935.
  • The Last Man, and other verses (Fifth Book Verses). London: Oxford University Press, 1936.
  • Sixth Book Verses. Alden Press, 1938.
  • Selected Poems (edited & foreword by Yvor Winters). New York: Morrow, 1947.
  • Seventh Book Verses. South Hinksey, UK: Carcanet, 1971.
  • Selected Poems. South Hinksey, UK: Carcanet, 1972.
  • Collected Poems (introduction by Donald Davie). Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1976.

Prose[]

"November_Sun,"_by_Elizabeth_Daryush

"November Sun," by Elizabeth Daryush


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.[3]

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ Catherine Phillips: Robert Bridges: a biography. Oxford: OUP, 1992. p 141.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Elizabeth Daryush entry, The Orlando Project, Cambridge University Press. Web, June 25, 2014.
  3. ↑ Elizabeth Daryush 1887-1977, Poetry Foundation, Web, Sep. 1, 2012.

External links[]

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