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Alice Corbin Henderson
n.d.
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers
Co-founder with Harriet Monroe
of the
seminal magazine, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, Alice Corbin
Henderson was an exacting editor. Of
her friend and co-editor—“Alice Corbin, the poet, Alice
Henderson, the wife and mother and critic,” Harriet Monroe
wrote, “Her round face with its smiling Cupid mouth, blue
eyes, and impertinent little nose, set in a pretty tangle of curly
blonde hair, looked blandly innocent, never preparing one for
the sharp wit which would flash out like a sword. She was a pitiless
reader of manuscripts; nothing stodgy or imitative would get by
her finely sifting intelligence, and we had many a secret laugh
over the confessional ‘hot stuff’ or the boggy word
weeds which tender-minded authors apparently mistook for poetry.”1
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Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s
Life, New York: Macmillan, 1938, pp. 317-18. |
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Alice Corbin Henderson’s commitment to American
literary traditions included an interest in Southwestern folklore and
stories, especially Native American songs and tales, and regional religious
traditions. Her book Brothers of Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest
(1937), was among the first sympathetic studies of the so-called “whipping
brotherhoods,” and their controversial religious practices. She
edited an anthology of poetry concerned with New Mexico, The Turquoise
Trail (1928), including work by Willa
Cather, Mabel Dodge Luhan,
and Mary Austin. A poet in her
own right, her collections of verse, including Red Earth: Poems of
New Mexico (1920) and The Sun Turns West (1933), were well
received by critics and enjoyed a wide readership.
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