Journal

'One day - one day - ' With this agreement, the poet closes the diary, which she must have written shortly before her death in 1950. It reminds us that the 16-year-old schoolgirl Edna was in the habit of discussing with her diary after doing her homework, inventing her lyrical ego in the process, so that she could effortlessly familiarise herself with it. Three or four years later, she blossomed into the author of the astonishing long poem Renascence, which made her instantly famous in 1912 and honoured her with a scholarship to the prestigious Vassar College. Many motifs from this famous first work - scepticism about life, death, apple trees - reappear in the journal, while others - Bluebeard, for example, Philosophies, is & is not - are reminiscent of later works. They are tuned to a remarkably quiet satirical/ironic tone - the expectation of death in doggerel verse - whose rhythm and linguistic gestures tempted the translator to look for analogies in the German vernacular.