Madeline Mason: Poet, Author, Translator, Critic, and Lecturer
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The Legacy of
Madeline Mason: Poet, Author, Translator, Critic, & Lecturer
Madeline Mason-Manheim was a poet, author, translator, critic, and lecturer active during the early and mid-20th century. Renowned by her literary peers during her lifetime for bridging the gap between modern and classical poetry with her new sonnet form, the eponymous Mason sonnet, Mason and her work have largely been forgotten by the academic and literary communities she influenced considerably.
Mason was born in 1908 in New York, but she spent much of her childhood in France and the United Kingdom. During her time abroad, she was mentored in writing by notable literary figures Arthur Symons and Sir Oliver Lodge and in music by pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. Through her early work, Mason’s talent for wordplay was recognized by many well-known men in the literary community, including Thomas Hardy, Romain Rolland, John Galsworthy, Edwin A. Robinson, Professor George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard, and Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale.
Mason’s first published work was Hill Fragments, a volume of poetry released in 1925 with a foreword by Symons and five illustrations by renowned author and artist Kahlil Gibran. Symons praised the “true originality” of Hill Fragments, writing, “[H]er verses are musical in the highest sense…” (Symons ix-xi). The following year, Mason published a translation into French of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Gibran praised the translation, saying Mason “has reproduced the thought and the rhythm of the original with a perfection I had not believed it possible to attain. I feel for the first time that my [work has] been truly recreated…”.
In the following years, Mason continued to write poetry, which she submitted for publication in various newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. She also served as a literary critic and vice president of the Poetry Society of America, and she dabbled in prose under the pen name Tyler Mason. Riding for Texas: The true adventures of Captain Bill McDonald of the Texas Rangers, a collaboration with Colonel Edward M. House, was her best-known work as Tyler Mason.
In 1949, Mason published her second collection of poetry, The Cage of Years. Professor Tinker noted, “Miss Mason uses both old patterns and new, rhymed lines and unrhymed lines, assonance, recurrent vowels and verbal echoes… Such features of the work lie on the surface, but style, as the wisdom of the past and the practice of today instruct us, is never merely external. So it is not by chance that Miss Mason’s excellence is seen in neat lines, like a bit of carved wood, turned again and again beneath the knife…” (Tinker 10).
At this point in her career, Mason was also lecturing extensively. Two of her popular lectures were “As I Knew Them”, in which she shared anecdotes of the “statesmen, artists and philosophers of the period between the two wars” who inspired the philosophy illustrated in The Cage of Years, and “In the Beginning Was the Word”, in which she examined the musicality of poetry through various famous poems. In 1953, Mason became the first American poet to read her own poems in front of the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse (now the Poetry Association of Scotland) at the Edinburgh Festival and to give the Festival Address.
In the 1950s, at what perhaps was the pinnacle of her writing career, Mason developed a sonnet with a new form and rhyme scheme. The Mason sonnet consists of an octet (eight lines of verse) and a sestet (six lines of verse), and the rhyme scheme of the lines is abc abc cbd bad ba (in the octet/sestet form, abcabccb dbadba). Mason first presented her sonnet in 1956 at the Coolidge Auditorium by invitation of The Library of Congress, and in 1958, she published At the Ninth Hour, a volume of poetry showcasing her new sonnet form. In a review of the volume in the Book News periodical (Vol. IX, No. 1, July 1961) from The University Press of Washington, D.C., also the publisher, the reviewer noted, “The immediate reaction of the critics in the audience [at the Library of Congress reading] was a realization that they were hearing for the first time the third sonnet vainly sought by Keats who was frustrated in his attempt to devise a worthy successor to the Petrarchan and Shakespearian forms.”
Mason published her last major volume of poetry, Sonnets in a New Form, in 1971. In the foreword to the book, Cornel Lengyel of the Living Poets Library wrote, “Aware of both tradition and innovation in the long and distinguished history of the sonnet, Madeline Mason offers a perceptive review in her Notes on the Sonnet, which introduces her present selection of poems. Her essay also furnishes an analysis of the Mason sonnet, a form which she has developed and which she illustrates in the cycle of sonnets which follow. Her poems, while rich and luminous in thought and feeling, have classic grace and clarity; they are accessible to the discerning reader and speak for themselves” (Lengyel viii-ix).