Pauline B. Barrington — Collected Poems and Literary Reviews

Pauline B. Barrington wrote at the point where Los Angeles newspaper culture, antiwar radicalism, and early modernist poetry began to overlap. Born Pauline V. Bucknor in Philadelphia in 1876, she married Charles Barrington in Pasadena in 1901 and made a literary life in Southern California while raising a family and working as a secretary. Her poems moved from the Los Angeles Graphic to The Masses, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, and The Lyric West. The best of them are quick, visual, and formally alert: city windows become frames of exclusion, a concert audience turns comic under the pressure of music, Redondo Beach passes from fish scales at dawn to the casino drum at night, and the traffic of Los Angeles overwhelms the old mission bells. “Toy Guns,” published before the United States entered the First World War, makes a child’s game part of the machinery of militarism. Barrington also became one of The Lyric West’s clearest interpreters of new poetry, writing about H.D., Marianne Moore, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Lawrence, Cummings, and others without giving up her own judgment. She died in Los Angeles in 1956. This volume gathers every Barrington poem presently recoverable in the project’s local sources, together with the literary reviews that can be securely signed or assigned to her.