Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling’s Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the poems are by no means monotonous. A fragrant whimsicality, a childlike freshness vivifies poems like “The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks,” “Dilemma” and “Frost on a Window,” which reminds one of the manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394).