2018 – Poetry and Photography – Remembering Eunice Tietjens

I thought I’d kick off 2018 on China Rhyming with some poetry…specifically from Eunice Tietjens and her largely forgotten and hard to find 1917 collection, Profiles from China, Sketches in Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior….the poems, which appeared in a variety of journals and magazines including (Harriet Monroe’s always keen on Chinese-related work) Poetry, The Seven Arts, The Chicago Evening Post, The Graphic, and The Little Review. Tietjens wrote of Chinese scenes and people as well the treaty port of Shanghai and colony of Hong Kong. I’ll try to pair the works with relevant photographs from the period as we progress…

Tietjens, born in 1844, was an American poet and journalist. She was a correspondent in France during WW1 for the Chicago Daily News while her poetry began to appear around the same time championed by Monroe’s Poetry journal. She was a great traveller and visited Japan and Taiwan (and elsewhere) as well as China.

I’ll dive in for a couple of weeks sampling her poems with some images and we’ll see if we can’t restore her reputation from obscurity a bit….