Rosemary Thomas

Thomas graduated from Smith College in 1923. In 1950, she received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University for an essay on Lawrence Durrell, the British poet and novelist.^[1]

She taught creative writing at various schools including Spence School and Brearley School in New York, Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and Oxford School in Hartford, Connecticut.^[1]

In 1951, Thomas won the Twayne First Book Contest for her only book of poems, Immediate Sun.^[2] The book had a foreword written by Archibald MacLeish, who described her poems as having "a common quality, a characteristic idiom, and inflection the reader would recognize again as a man recognizes the inflection of a decisive voice".^[3] The book includes a poem about her brother-in-law, Canadian tennis star J.F. Foulkes, entitled "The Colonel".^[4] Her poems were also published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and in other magazines.^[1][5]

The final years of her life, which she devoted entirely to her writing, were divided between her homes in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and New York City, where she died in 1961.^[3][6]

A posthumous collection of her poems was published in 1968, titled Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas, with a foreword by Mark van Doren. He wrote: "Rosemary Thomas's poems will last, as all things excellent do, for the simple reason that nothing like them exists elsewhere."^[3]

In 2004, her poem "The Elephants Pass Carnegie Hall" was set to music by composer David Leisner in his piece A Timeless Procession. It was first performed in 2011 at Symphony Space in New York City.^[7][8] The program for the performance records that Leisner discovered Thomas's poems by chance at a library book sale in the late 1980s. He describes her as a "lyrical, imaginative, spiritual-minded poet whose work simply begged me to set it to music".^[9]

The English Language and Literature Department at Smith College awards the Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize annually to the best poem or group of poems.^[10]