Queer Places:
Barnard College (Seven Sisters), 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Saint Helena Cemetery
Saint Helena, Napa County, California, USA
Helen Lyman commonly known as Helen Hoyt or Helen Hoyt
Lyman (January 22, 1887 – August 2, 1972)[1]
was an
American poet.
The editors of Poetry, Harriet Monroe and
Alice Corbin Henderson
included in their 1917 selection for The New Poetry: An Anthology
poems by
Helen Hoyt. According to
Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw,
authors of Amy Lowell, American Modern, what connects these poets is their
appartenance to the queer sisterhood.
She was born as Helen Hoyt in Norwalk, Connecticut on January 22, 1887.[2][3] Her father was Henry M. Hoyt, Civil War Officer and 18th Governor of Pennsylvania. Her niece was Elinor Wylie, American poet and novelist popular in the 1920s and 1930s and daughter of Henry Martyn Hoyt, Jr., who would be United States Solicitor General from 1903 to 1909. Hoyt's brother, Morton McMichael Hoyt (1899-1949), married Eugenia Bankhead, known as "Sister" and sister of Tallulah Bankhead. Helen Hoyt received her AB from Barnard College in 1909.
In 1921 she married fellow poet William Whittingham Lyman Jr, and so also became known either as Mrs. W.W. Lyman[4] or Helen Hoyt Lyman.[5]
Early in her career Helen Hoyt was an Associate Editor of the journal Poetry, and also had numerous articles and poems published within the magazine from 1913 to 1936. She also edited the September 1916 edition of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse,[6] the woman's number. Other magazines to publish her work include The Egoist and The Masses.[7]
Aside from her own collections, her work was also published in notable anthologies of her times, including The New Poetry: An Anthology (1917), The Second Book of Modern Verse (1920), Silver Pennies: Modern Poems for Boys and Girls (1925), May Days (1926), and The Best Poems of 1931.[8]
Her poems include Ellis Park, Memory, Lamp Posts and Rain At Night.
In 1932, she wrote the foreword to California Poets: An Anthology of 244 Contemporaries, [House of Henry Harrison, editors].
She was a contemporary of Marianne Moore and Mina Loy, among others.
She was known to entertain correspondence with Idella Purnell Stone and Clark Ashton Smith.
She died in Saint Helena, California, in 1972.
My published books:
