Margaret Tynes Fairley, Seminary Class of 1918, enjoyed success as a playwright, seeing her work published in The New York Times, Nature Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, among others, and joining a distinguished circle of poets who helped promote her work, including e.e. cummings and Kenneth Patchen.
Now, more than 30 years after her death, and 100 years after graduating from Mary Baldwin Seminary, Fairley’s book of lyric poetry, The Year Wears Its Seasons, is available on Amazon.
According to a press release, Fairley’s poetry is diverse both in themes and styles, drawing on the universality of human experience, love, life and death, mountains, seacoast and islands, the seasons, birds and animals, flowers and plants, and people and places of her native Virginia and her adopted land of the Penobscot Bay of Maine.
Influences include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings, and the painter Fairfield Porter and his poet wife Anne. She liked to tell the story of coming upon Robert Frost in a grocery store in Cambridge for the first time: She said, “You must be Robert Frost, the poet!” to which he replied, “And you must be the poet, Margaret Fairley!”
Fairley’s sons, William and Jim Fairley, helped secure a publisher for their mother’s poetry — fulfilling her dream to publish a book of her work. William said that she was a prolific poet; they cataloged a staggering 2,281 poems.
“My mother was not as organized about getting her poetry out as she was in writing it, though she did have a number published in recognized places especially in the 1929s and 30s,” William said. “For years she wanted to get out a book, but there seemed always to be obstacles, despite several attempts. When my brother, Jim, and I found last January a very helpful publisher (Bambaz Press in Los Angeles) who was excited about the poetry, we finally found a way.”