A Woman and Mountains By Helen Hoyt—National Poetry Month 2023

                                    Helen Hoyt in her years as Poetry magazine's Assistant Editor.

Helen Hoyt, also known as Helen Lyman or Helen Hoyt Lyman  was born on January 22, 1887 in in Norwalk, Connecticut.  Her father was Henry M. Hoyt, Civil War officer and Governor of Pennsylvania. Her niece was Elinor Wylie, an American poet and novelist popular in the 1920s and 1930s.  Her younger brother, Morton McMichael Hoyt, married Eugenia Bankhead, sister of Tallulah Bankhead.

Hoyt received her AB from Barnard College in 1909. 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 quiet loyalty to a queer sisterhood.

In 1921 she married fellow poet William Whittingham Lyman Jr.

Early in her career Hoyt was an Associate Editor of Poetry, and also had numerous articles and poems published by the magazine from 1913 to 1936.  She also edited the September 1916 edition of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, the woman’s edition. Other magazines to publish her work include The Egoist and The Masses.

Hoyt died in Saint Helena, California, in 1972.

                                An issue of Poetry featuring a verse by Hoyt.

A Woman and Mountains

I am rounded, billowed out, hunched like you;

I am big like you, ugly and beautiful;

Eternal like you.

I have set my body solidly upon the earth, to confront all;

My head to the sky, the sky on my shoulders,

Feet rooted in the earth’s depths as mountains are rooted.

Nothing can sweep over me to remove me;

This life in me is ancient, shall go down to the last days,

As your life, mountains, that have endured unwaning.

Nothing can undo us, my strength and yours.

 

Indolent and proud, obtuse with great curves,

I rest here against the earth—

Stretched out, with mighty flanks; big with birth.

Look at me, mountains!

I lean back against the sky, the horizon between my hands;

Ample and bounteous, bulged wide, wide-bosomed,

Immovable in heaviness, in lethargy of dreaming,

Consummate, content.

 

The clouds rest on me, the rain renews me,

The winds whisper, trees sway—

I nourish a great verdure, I am strong with rocks.

The hills of my breasts shall let down rivers of life—

Life flowing from life, from the furthermost source,

From the fountain never-ceasing, the ancient beginning.

Nothing can ever remove us, mountains, my strength and yours.

 

—Helen Hoyt

 

From Poetry  vol. 32, no. 5,  August 1928.