I lived from 1910-1986.
I was from the USA, and am in the Americas category.
Hilda Conkling was the younger daughter of the poetess Grace Hazard Conkling, who also taught English at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Her father passed away when she was four and Hilda and her sister Elsa, older than her by two years, lived with their mother in Northampton, a town surrounded by woods and hills. The beauty of the country-side had a deep impact on Hilda, and is a recurrent theme in her poetry.
Read full description by Pari Ali-Old Poetry Research Team...
Grace had a very deep relationship with her daughters and they had never known a nurse. She had been her children's closest companion since their birth. The sisters studied at a school close by, and in the afternoons took long walks, or played in the garden, while their mother wrote.
Grace Conkling also read out to her children, read out beautiful literature, introducing them to the best books at an early age. Words heard in childhood, have a way of seeping through the consciousness and lying latent in the memory till their understanding dawns on the child may be till much later, but beautiful words heard at an early age even when not understood are never rejected by the mind or forgotten. No doubt the words that Grace Conkling read out to her children had a deep effect on them. Grace also listened to her children and patiently answered all their queries, which perhaps a nurse or governess would not have done and this undoubtedly helped even more in their mental growth and development.
She was also a musician and played fine music to them on the piano, and so the children were brought up in an atmosphere of love and security that is a special gift of a loving parent. They were surrounded by beauty of nature, of music and of words. The entire environment of her upbringing was conducive to honing her talent as a poetess.
Hilda's poems came out in the course of conversation with her mother. She rarely hesitated for a word. As she spoke them Grace wrote them down. Grace had the wisdom not to show her a better way but let express herself in her own way. Sometimes she would write them from memory and read it out to Hilda, who always remembered if it was not in its original form. The poems are unaltered and as Hilda spoke them. The titles though have been added from the text for the sake of convenience.
Hilda's first book of poems Poems of a Little Girl, introduced by the poetess Amy Lowell was published when she was just ten. In 1922 Shoes of the Wind appeared and in 1924 Silverhorn.
Hilda stopped composing as a teenager, after her mother stopped copying her poems down.
From The Introduction written by Amy Lowell for Poems of a little girl.
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