星野 文子

This paper will examine the early career of American female poet Ina Donna Coolbrith from the perspective of social expectations and gender. Coolbrith was a successful poet. She was crowned as the first Poet Laureate of California in June 1915. She started publishing poetry as a teenager, and was a pioneer of the “frontier” period of Californian Literature. When the literary magazine Overland Monthly was founded in 1868, Coolbrith, Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard were known as the “Golden Gate Trinity.” Her peers included poets and writers such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Joaquin Miller; they were all young and seeking national recognition. Despite her success, being a woman made developing her career difficult compared to male writers. In order to understand her unique situation, this paper will examine her early poems and personal correspondence. It will explore her social circumstances, the gender limitations she faced, and her personal feelings about her career.

This paper will examine Yone Noguchi’s poetics and way of life concerning “being a poet,” as expressed in his English novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902). This book was considered his first and only non-poetry book in English published during his eleven years living in the United States and England. In contrast to scholarship that focuses on his work from the point of view of Japonism, or his personal life—Noguchi had a child with his American editor Leonie Gilmour, and their son was the well-known sculptor Isamu Noguchi — this paper will focus on Noguchi’s obsession with poetry and “being a poet,” as expressed in this work. Analyzing his idea of “being a poet,” I will argue that this work, though a fictional novel, constitutes an attempt to write about the development of Noguchi’s identity as a poet. The paper is based on the presentation at The Tokyo American Literature Society’s section meeting of the monthly meeting on September 24, 2016.