“I attended your Auntie's literary gathering some time ago, and disgraced myself by refusing to act up to my poetry.”

On the gap between the woman and the expected poet-persona · Letter to Helen Coleman, 28 February 1909

• Poets
• Self
• Society

“I fluctuate between seasons of lurid wealth and extended periods of acute financial depression.”

On the irregular income of magazine verse and stories · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Money
• Profession
• Writing

“Poetry is all very well. But when you are reduced to seventeen cents and some stamps.”

Comic collision of lyric vocation and cash shortage · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Money
• Poetry
• Poverty

“I cannot give up my work. It is quite impossible to do so, and I have never yet met the man who will consent to my keeping on with it after marriage.”

Refusal to abandon vocation for the ordinary way of marriage · Reply to her physician, as recorded by her father

• Marriage
• Vocation
• Work

“Let some of your rules as to form go, and sing.”

Preference for music and singing over strict construction · Letter to Alfred Gordon

• Form
• Music
• Poetry

“You hold the form of a poem of supreme importance; I believe in the supremacy of thought.”

Statement of poetics against rigid scansion and the heavy mechanism of verse · Letter to Alfred Gordon

• Form
• Poetry
• Thought

“I don't think I should have been a respectable lady if I'd lived in them days. I'd have gone off with anyone who looked like that. Daphne was a fool.”

Playful revolt against respectability after quoting Swinburne on Apollo · Letter to Helen Coleman, 4 August 1910

• Convention
• Desire
• Rebellion

“Emotions with a foreknowledge of impermanence, a daring mind with only the tongue as outlet, a greed for experience plus a slavery to convention — what the deuce are you to make of that? As a man, you could go ahead and stir things up fine.”

On the constraints of gender upon appetite for life and speech · Letter to Helen Coleman, 29 December 1919

• Experience
• Freedom
• Gender

“To me, the trying part is being a woman at all. I've come to the ultimate conclusion that I'm a misfit of the worst kind, in spite of a superficial femininity.”

Frustration at the clash between daring mind, greed for experience, and convention · Letter to Helen Coleman, 29 December 1919

• Convention
• Identity
• Women

“There is absolutely no must in things except the Must of being born and dying.”

Advice against becoming a slave to custom and appearances · Letter to Helen Coleman, 27 March 1913

• Convention
• Freedom
• Life

“Being a poet in the present state of the market is like saying How is your hare-lip today?”

Wry comment on the awkwardness and poor market for verse · Letter to Helena Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Humour
• Poetry
• Profession

“Don't keep reminding me I'm a poet. I very seldom feel equal to living up to my own Immortal Verse.”

Ironic self-deflation of the public poet-persona she felt she could not inhabit · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Humility
• Poets
• Writing