Gladys Cromwell was born November 28, 1885, in New York City. She was educated in New York private schools and lived abroad a great deal. “Her life,” writes Anne Dunn, “was little indented by outer events, being wholly of the mind and spirit.” She was most at home in the world within herself, sensitive and—to the final, tragic degree—self-effacing.

In January, 1918, Gladys and Dorothea, her twin-sister, enrolled in the Canteen Service of the Red Cross, sailed for France and were stationed at ChÂlons. Both girls worked unremittingly for eight months. It was only at the end of their desperate labors that they gave way to hopelessness, believing their efforts futile and the whole world desolate. Signs of a mental breakdown show in their diaries as early as October. “After the armistice,” writes Anne Dunn in her biographical note which serves as an appreciative epilogue to Gladys Cromwell’s Poems, “they showed symptoms of nervous prostration; but years of self-control and consideration for others made them conceal the black horror in which they lived, the agony through which they saw a world which, they felt, contained no refuge for beauty or quiet thought. And when, on their way home, they jumped from the deck of the Lorraine it was in response to a vision that promised them fulfilment and peace.” After their death, which occurred January 19, 1919, the French Government awarded the two sisters the Croix de Guerre.

Gates of Utterance (1915) has something more than the usual “promise.” But the best of Miss Cromwell’s work can be found in her posthumously published Poems (1919), which, in 1920, received the yearly prize offered by the Poetry Society of America, dividing the honor with Neihardt’s The Song of Three Friends. Her most significant poems betray that attitude to life which was at the heart of her tragedy—a preoccupation that was a mixture of fascination and fear. Her lines, never mediocre, are introspective and fraught with serious concern—the work of a frailer and unsmiling Emily Dickinson. Several of the best of her delicate songs, like the two lyrics quoted, tremble on the verge of greatness.