THE INSPIRATION

I Bear Your Colors creates a musical narrative using the accounts of women that are members of the LGBTQ+ community, or who have strong associations with that community. The program features these women’s words through their poetic texts in musical settings, as well as their letters and diary entries. On this page, we have gathered short biographies of these women, as well as links to more information about them and their incredible lives.

Virginia Woolf

and

Vita Sackville-West

Virginia Woolf, original name Adeline Virginia Stephen, was born January 25, 1882 in London, England and died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex. Virginia Woolf was a writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre.

While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.

Vita Sackville-West, original name Victoria Mary Sackville-West, and married name Victoria Mary Nicolson, was born March 9, 1892, in Knole, Kent, England and died on June 2, 1962 in Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. She was an English novelist and poet who wrote chiefly about the Kentish countryside, where she spent most of her life. She was the daughter of the 3rd Baron Sackville and a granddaughter of Pepita, a Spanish dancer, whose story she told in Pepita (1937). In 1913 she married Harold Nicolson, a diplomat and author. Her poetic gift for evoking the beauty of the English countryside was recognized in her long poem The Land (1926). Apart from her many novels, of which the best known are The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), she also wrote biographies and several gardening books. She was the chief model for the character Orlando in the novel of that title written by Virginia Woolf. In 1948 she was made a Companion of Honour.

Learn more about their relationship here.

Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale, in full Sara Trevor Teasdale, (born August 8, 1884, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 29, 1933, New York, New York), American poet whose short, personal lyrics were noted for their classical simplicity and quiet intensity.

Teasdale was educated privately and made frequent trips to Chicago, where she eventually became part of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine circle. Her first published poem appeared in the St. Louis, Missouri, weekly Reedy’s Mirror in May 1907, and later that year she published her first volume of verse, Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems. A second volume, Helen of Troy, and Other Poems, followed in 1911. She married in 1914 (having rejected another suitor, the poet Vachel Lindsay), and in 1915 her third collection of poems, Rivers to the Sea, was published. She moved with her husband to New York City in 1916. In 1918 she won the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry) and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for Love Songs (1917). During this time she also edited two anthologies, The Answering Voice: One Hundred Love Lyrics by Women (1917), and Rainbow Gold for Children (1922).

Learn more about her close ties to other women here.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, in full Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, (born December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 15, 1886, Amherst), American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.

Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. Devoted to private pursuits, she sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents while apparently keeping the greater number to herself. She habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and influenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even of grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance, and lack of high polish.

Learn more about her communications and close relationship with Susan Gilbert here.

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell, (born Feb. 9, 1874, Brookline, Mass., U.S.—died May 12, 1925, Brookline), American critic, lecturer, and a leading poet of the Imagist school.

Lowell came from a prominent Massachusetts family (her brothers were Abbott Lawrence Lowell, later president of Harvard, and astronomer Percival Lowell). She was educated in private schools and by her mother, and until she was 28 she did little but alternately live at home, where she enjoyed the life of a Boston socialite, and travel abroad. About 1902 she decided to devote her energies to poetry. It was eight years before her first piece, a conventional but not undistinguished sonnet, was published in The Atlantic Monthly, and two more before her first volume, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912), appeared.

Lowell’s vivid and powerful personality and her independence and zest made her conspicuous, as did her scorn of convention in such defiant gestures as smoking cigars. Having been displaced by her as the leader of the Imagists, Pound promptly restyled them the “Amygists” in tribute to Lowell’s domineering qualities. Her eminence among the modern poets of the day thus derived perhaps less from the quality of her own verse than from her courageous and highly pragmatic leadership. In addition to her poetry and books of criticism, Lowell lectured frequently and wrote critical articles for periodicals. The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell was published in 1955.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay, (born February 22, 1892, Rockland, Maine, U.S.—died October 19, 1950, Austerlitz, New York), American poet and dramatist who came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s.

Millay was reared in Camden, Maine, by her divorced mother, who recognized and encouraged her talent in writing poetry. Her first published poem appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine for children in October 1906. She remained at home after her graduation from high school in 1909, and in four years she published five more poems in St. Nicholas. Her first acclaim came when “Renascence” was included in The Lyric Year in 1912; the poem brought Millay to the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for her to attend Vassar College. She graduated in 1917.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop, (born Feb. 8, 1911, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 6, 1979, Boston, Mass.), American poet known for her polished, witty, descriptive verse. Her short stories and her poetry were first published in The New Yorker and other magazines. Bishop was reared by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and by an aunt in Boston. After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, she traveled abroad often, living for a time in Key West, Florida (1938–42), and Mexico (1943). She was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (now poet laureate consultant in poetry) from 1949 to 1950. During most of the 1950s and ’60s she lived with Lota de Macedo Soares in Petrópolis, Braz., near Rio de Janeiro, later dividing the year between Petrópolis and San Francisco. Her first book of poems, North & South (1946), captures the divided nature of Bishop’s allegiances: born in New England and reared there and in Nova Scotia, she eventually migrated to hotter regions. This book was reprinted in 1955, with additions, as North & South: A Cold Spring, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

Learn more about her passionate partnership with Lota de Macedo Soares here.

May Swenson

May Swenson, (born May 28, 1919, Logan, Utah, U.S.—died Dec. 4, 1989, Ocean View, Del.), American poet whose work is noted for its engaging imagery, intricate wordplay, and eccentric use of typography. Her poetry has been compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and George Herbert.

Swenson was educated at Utah State University (B.A., 1939). She later moved to New York City and worked for New Directions Press as a stenographer and editor. She was writer in residence at several North American universities.

Learn more about her vivid confessional poetry and its “beguiling imagery” here.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein, (born Feb. 3, 1874, Allegheny City [now in Pittsburgh], Pa., U.S.—died July 27, 1946, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.

Stein spent her infancy in Vienna and in Passy, France, and her girlhood in Oakland, Calif. She entered the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (renamed Radcliffe College in 1894), where she studied psychology with the philosopher William James and received her degree in 1898. She studied at Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1897 to 1902 and then, with her older brother Leo, moved first to London and then to Paris, where she was able to live by private means. She lived with Leo, who became an accomplished art critic, until 1909; thereafter she lived with her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967).