At the Ninth Hour by Madeline Mason, 1958

The Cage of Years by Madeline Mason, 1949

For the majority of her life, Madeline Mason-Manheim influenced the literary community with her voice and her pen. As a child prodigy, she put “herself, really… into [Hill Fragments], her deeper self, and to give adequate expression to that, to the real self, is the utmost we can ask or get from any poet” (Symons xiv). She impressed both the author and critics with her French translation of The Prophet. In The Cage of Years, ”[b]y deliberate choice of the author, the thirty-three lyrics in this book are both reminiscent of the past and suggestive of something certainly not from the past, and yet somehow not modern” (Tinker 10). With At the Ninth Hour, Mason “devise[d] a worthy successor to the Petrarchan and Shakespearian forms… hers is the art that conceals art. The concentrated emotion in each poem prevents its intellectual content from debilitating the effect of the poetry itself… There is no obscurity here.” And through her lectures on her experiences learning from her famous mentors and the inherent musicality in poetry, Mason helped remind the modernizing literary community of the foundation laid by classical poets and the lessons they teach.

Le Prophète by Kahlil Gibran, translated from English by Madeline Mason-Manheim, 1926

Despite these significant literary contributions, little biographical and professional information about Mason remained available after her death. Her books are difficult to find outside of a university library or archive, and the poetry and serials she contributed to many newspapers, magazines, and periodicals have been lost to time. As has happened to authors from every period of literary history, Mason’s influence and significance appears to have begun and ended with her life. This could be for any number of reasons—for being a wealthy upper-class woman from New York in a time when the popularity of the upper class was declining; for praising the work of old white men in a time when public interest shifted to literature from more marginalized voices; or for touting a poetic form that “seems to have fallen out of fashion on the current scene” because of “its rigorous demand for rhyme and meter and its equally challenging demand for balanced thought and sentiment, for art and craftsmanship…” (Lengyel vii).

Hill Fragments by Madeline Mason-Manheim, 1925

Ultimately, the reason is not as important as the fact that Mason’s influence did seem to end with her death. Regardless of the hypothetical reasons listed above, if one agrees with any of them, the significance of Mason’s literary contributions, especially the Mason sonnet, should outweigh any hesitation toward the potentially unpopular perspectives that influenced her work. As Lengyel stated in the foreword to Sonnets in a New Form, “the sonnet has proved a fascinating form for major poets for the past seven centuries…” (Lengyel vii), and according to Mason herself, “[t]astes and styles move in cycles…” (Mason xxi). A form of literature with as long and storied a history as poetry, and a poetic form as classic and ancient as the sonnet, deserve to have their histories preserved in their entirety. Madeline Mason is the most recent chapter in those histories.