Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico (1920)

Alice Corbin’s Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico, originally published in 1920, marked a significant moment in the history of modern poetry. Its aesthetic power half explained its impact but also because it made an important contribution to the culture wars then being waged over the formation of the modern poetry canon. A noted poet and associate editor of Poetry magazine, Corbin (1881-1949) profoundly believed that there is never any divorce between life and art, because art is life. With Red Earth, Corbin strove to create a democratic poetry that spoke to ordinary readers. In 1916 the young poet, suffering from tuberculosis, left Chicago, the heart of the literary and art renaissance, for the place so many artists and writers had gone seeking cures: Santa Fe. Corbin and her husband, painter William Penhallow Henderson, embraced New Mexico, its people and its landscape. Corbin brought prominent poets, such as Sandburg and Frost, to the art colony, and through her work helped to put New Mexico’s literature and arts on America’s cultural map. Editor Lois Rudnick says of Red Earth, it includes original imagist poems and traditional folk songs; poems written in the style of Indian songs and Hispanic ballads; and rhymed and free verse, reflecting a diversity of voices, forms, and styles. This new edition is illustrated with 29 masterworks from Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts collection reflecting the landscape and cultures of the region from which Corbin drew such inspiration.