Mary Ethel Barnard papers

Mary Ethel Barnard was born in Vancouver, Washington, on December 6, 1909. She lived most of her life in Vancouver, except for a few years in Boston and 15 years in New York. An only child of Samuel Melvin and Bertha Hoard Barnard, she had a childhood rich with books, trips on back roads to timber mills, and summers at Ocean Park on the Washington coast.

Mary graduated from Vancouver High School, Vancouver, Washington, and then from Reed College in 1932. For two years, she worked for Emergency Relief Administration, but continued to write poetry. Seeking literary advice, she sent six of her best poems to Ezra Pound in Italy. His reply began a special relationship, described by Mary as master and apprentice, which continued until his death. Through the guidance of her mentor, she became acquainted with the leading literary figures of the modernist movement.

By age 26, Mary was publishing poems and won Poetry magazine’s distinguished Levinson Award. In 1938, she moved to New York, meeting contemporary poets like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and other artists at the summer colony of Yaddo. For four years, she was curator for the Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library in Buffalo. Her literary autobiography, Assault on Mt. Helicon, written with young writers in mind, recounts her arduous navigation through the publishing and literary world of New York.

In 1951 at age 41, Mary Barnard found herself back in Vancouver for a time, ill with hepatitis, reading Homer to stave off boredom. Taking Pound’s advice to translate, she worked on Greek metrics—those of Sappho’s. Her clear but elegant translation was exactly what the modernist poets were aiming for. Her Sappho: A New Translation was published by the University of California Press in 1958. By 1994, it had sold over 100,000 copies. It has never been out of print and was reissued. In 1999, Mary discussed Sappho on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation”.

Mary published five collections of poetry, her first published volume being “Cool Country” as part of Five Young American Poets 1940, followed by A Few Poems (1952).

In 1978, she began a decade of close association with a young new publisher and recent graduate of Reed College, James Anderson. In 1979, the fledgling Breitenbush Books published Mary’s Collected Poems, which became one of the most critically praised books of the year and winner of the Elliston Award. Her essay in verse, Time and the White Tigress (Breitenbush, 1986), with linocuts by Anita Bigelow, won the 1986 Western States Book Award for Poetry.

Her prose works include The Mythmakers (Ohio University Press, 1966), a commonsense approach to mythology which grew out of her research on Sappho and Three Fables (Breitenbush, 1983). Nantucket Genesis: The Tale of My Tribe (Breitenbush, 1988) recounts her family history in verse.

Mary’s achievements have been widely recognized. She was given a special award by the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts and honored at the 17th and 22nd annual Portland Poetry Festivals. The 1994 issue of Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship was completely devoted to Mary’s work and her relationship to Pound. Her poems have appeared in several major anthologies, and she has collaborated with composers who have set her words to music.

Mary Ethel Barnard died of complications of cancer in her home in Vancouver, Washington, on August 25, 2002, at the age of 91.

(From the memorial program, First Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, WA, written by Elizabeth Bell, MALS ’87.)