When that sense of being from the nation’s “aggrieved periphery” proves overwhelming, I find myself turning to a section of Elizabeth Brewster’s “Seven Poems for Seven Decades,” which encapsulates the simultaneity of believing the place you are from has value and being told that it cannot. The poem itself recounts Brewster hearing T.S. Eliot read while she was a student at Harvard (then-Radcliffe) and her own response to Eliot and the traditions he represents:
When T. S. Eliot came to read
In middle May, in heat-wave weather,
I arrived an hour early to be sure to hear him,
Sat in the sweating auditorium
While the man who introduced him described him
As Our Greatest Living Poet.
(“Looks a commonplace enough little man,”
I wrote in my diary later,
But of course admired him
As much as the others did,
Almost believed the introduction.)
I too planned to be a poet—
Maybe even (such is youthful arrogance)
The Greatest Living.
Though how could a young woman
From backwoods New Brunswick
Be so uppity
As to place her individual talent
Next to all that tradition? (71-72)
Brewster was herself a New Brunswick poet, a woman who was a “half-generation” removed from Smith and other artists like P.K. Page, Miller Brittain and Erica Deichmann Gregg (Brewster, “‘beauty’” 25). She eventually rejects Eliot’s poetry, “more fashionable because more difficult” (ibid.), but is still wracked with self-limiting deprecation and doubt borne from being a “young woman / From backwoods New Brunswick.”