Pauline B. Barrington

Pauline B. Barrington (July 11, 1876–December 5, 1956)[1] was an American writer recognized for her 1916 poem “Education”, which protested American involvement in World War I. “Education” was included in the first anthology dedicated exclusively to women's poetry from World War I, Scars Upon My Heart (1981).

Life

Barrington was born Pauline V. Bucknor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[2] to Charles Bucknor, a cigar manufacturer,[3] and Clara R. Bucknor (née Reaney).[4] She married Charles Barrington in September 1901 in Pasadena, California.[2] Thereafter, she lived in California and published under the name Pauline B. Barrington. The couple had two children.[5] In Women’s Poetry of the First World War, Nosheen Khan notes that Barrington worked as a secretary.[2] She died in Los Angeles, California in 1956.[5]

Works

Although today recognized as a poet, Barrington began her writing career as a playwright. When a Woman is Poor, a one act play from 1914,[6] was followed the next year by When the Young Birds Go, which received first place in the Los Angeles Drama League Manuscript Play Contest, June 1915.[7] In 1915, Barrington published her first poems in the Los Angeles Graphic. According to a brief early biography, she contributed to The Masses and The Conservator.[8] Two of her poems appeared in the influential literary magazine Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe. She also served as a reviewer for The Lyric West: A Magazine of American Verse.[9]

Barrington published over a dozen poems with the Los Angeles Graphic between 1915 and 1916.[10] Literary historian Mike Chasar argues that the first quarter of the twentieth century was a time when “people in the United States were producing and consuming more verse than at any other time in history” through a culture of books, magazines, newspapers, and classroom readers.[11] It followed that “A White Iris”, one of Barrington’s “garden poems”, was promptly republished in anthologies such as Golden Songs of the Golden State (1917),[12] The Melody of the Earth (1918),[13] and an edition of the Bulletin of the Garden Club of America (1922).[14]

"Toy Guns" by Pauline B. Barrington, illustrated by Frank Renne. From The Masses (May 1916).

Today Barrington is known for her antiwar poem "Education". The poem was originally published with the title “Toy Guns” in the socialist monthly The Masses in May 1916.[15] As Margaret Jones points out, “Long before the United States entered the war in 1917 (an event which was to lead to the closing down of the magazine, and the trial of its editors, under the Espionage Act), every issue [of The Masses] carried antiwar cartoons, reports from the European fronts, and pacifist poetry. A significant proportion of these antiwar gestures were the work of women”.[16] By 1918, the poem was retitled “Education” and included in Poems Written During the Great War, 1914-1918: An Anthology.[8]

The final stanza of “Education” reads:

War is slipping, dripping death on earth,
If the child is father of the man . . .
Is the toy gun father of the Krupps?
For Christ’s sake think!
While you sew,
Row after row.

In her analysis of the poem, Elizabeth A. Marsland finds that Barrington “raises a question that is still a major concern, even in peacetime—the part played by mothers in promoting the acceptability of violence”.[17] Jane Dowson refers to the poem’s “critique of women’s collusion with militarism”: “There are two competing discourses: the official and idealised depiction of the women at home and the underlying objection to the man made concept of military glory which was alien to them and which devastated their personal lives”.[18]

Barrington published a second anti-war poem, “The Orchid Hunter” in The Los Angeles Times in 1917.[19] In it, Barrington adopts the voice of a soldier who has been “mutilated beyond recognition” in the Great War and subsequently hides himself from the world, seeking rare flora:

I was a year in the trenches
Among the tear and spatter
Of shrapnel.
Among headless men, twisted men, mad men
In masses,
Under the scream of shells
Blossoming overhead
Like flowers of flame in greenish light,
In a world of torture, pain and dread.

Bibliography

Poetry
  • “At the Symphony Concert”, The Los Angeles Graphic, December 18, 1915.
  • “A Fire Star”, The Los Angeles Graphic, December 25, 1915.
  • “Carnival”, The Los Angeles Graphic, January 1, 1916.
  • “Cubes and Cones”, The Los Angeles Graphic, January 15, 1916.
  • “Outside”, The Los Angeles Graphic, January 29, 1916.
  • “On Hearing an Etude by Bortkiewicz”, The Los Angeles Graphic, February 5, 1916.
  • “A Day of Trees”, The Los Angeles Graphic, February 19, 1916.
  • “The Casement Door”, The Los Angeles Graphic, March 4, 1916.
  • “Spring”, The Los Angeles Graphic, March 18, 1916.
  • “Impressions”, The Los Angeles Graphic, April 8, 1916.
  • “Toy Guns”, The Masses, Vol. 8, no. 11, May 1916, p. 13.
  • “Vignettes”, The Los Angeles Graphic, May 27, 1916.
  • “A White Iris”, The Los Angeles Graphic, June 10, 1916.
  • “Ice Skates”, The Los Angeles Graphic, July 18, 1916.
  • “But for You”, The Los Angeles Graphic, September 30, 1916.
  • “The Birthday of a King”, Oakland Tribune, December 25, 1916.
  • “The Orchid Hunter”, The Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1917.
  • "The Pomegranate Bush", Poetry, Vol. 12, no. 6 (1918), pp. 304-305.
  • "Sunrise at Santa Barbara", Poetry, Vol. 12, no. 6 (1918), pp. 303-304.

Plays

When a Woman is Poor (1914)

When the Young Birds Go, a play in one act. Los Angeles: C.C. Parker, 1915. Available online at Internet Archive

References
  1. Date of birth from U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015; Date of death from State of California. California Death Index, 1940-1997. Sacramento, CA, USA: State of California Department of Health Services, Center for Health Statistics.
  2. Nosheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988, p. 182.
  3. “Chas. Bucknor”. U.S. Census Bureau. 1880 United States Federal Census for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with Pauline’s age listed as 3.
  4. “Clara Louise Reaney” in U.S., Presbyterian Church Records, 1701-1970 / Bethesda Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia: 1867-1875.
  5. “Obituary: Pauline Barrington”, The Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1956, p. 76.
  6. When a Woman is Poor. Catalogue of Title-entries of Books and Other Articles Entered in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, Under the Copyright Law. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914, p. 808.
  7. Preface to When the Young Birds Go, a play in one act. Los Angeles: C.C. Parker, 1915. Available online at Internet Archive,
  8. Bertram Lloyd, ed. Poems Written During the Great War, 1914-1918: An Anthology, London: Allen & Unwin, 1918, p. 10, 22-23. Available at Google Books
  9. The Lyric West: A Magazine of American Verse, Grace Atherton Dennen, Editor, Vol. 3 (1923), published in Los Angeles. Available at Internet Archive
  10. Index of Poets and Poems published in American Magazines October 1915-September 1916, in Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1916, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite, New York: Lawrence Gomme, 1916, p. 189. Available at Google Books
  11. Mike Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 6.
  12. “In a Garden”, in Marguerite Wilkinson, ed., Golden Songs of the Golden State, AC McClurg & Company, 1917. pp. 120-22.
  13. “A White Iris” in Gertrude Moore [Mrs. Waldo] Richards, ed., The Melody of Earth: An Anthology of Garden and Nature Poems from Present-day Poets, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918, p. 32.
  14. “A White Iris” in Bulletin of the Garden Club of America, United States, March 1922 (No. 4), p. 226.
  15. “Toy Guns”, The Masses, Vol. 8, no. 7, May 1916, p. 13.
  16. Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1993, p. 78.
  17. Elizabeth A. Marsland, The Nation's Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War, New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 125.
  18. Jane Dowson, Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity, Routledge, London, 2016, p. 49.
  19. “The Orchid Hunter”, The Los Angeles Times, Oct 30, 1917, p. 16.

Further reading
  • Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
  • Nosheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
  • Elizabeth A. Marsland, The Nation's Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War, New York: Routledge, 2012.
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