Extremes and Moderations: A Historical Archive of Los Angeles and Southern California Poetry

THE TEXT/TECH PAPERS

Anthology

Lyric West - A Modernist Anthology gathers material from The Lyric West into a book that can stand on its own. It brings together 111 entries, beginning with Gaydiang by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Quid Iuvat Ornato by Weare Holbrook, and Redondo by the Sea by Pauline Barrington. The selection turns a large run of periodical material into something a reader can enter in an afternoon and return to over time. It is not meant to replace the journal’s history. Instead, it offers a clear doorway: representative writing, useful names, and enough context to connect each piece with the publication that first carried it.

The Lyric West was not a modernist magazine. It was a Los Angeles monthly of general verse, hospitable to the sonnet, the ballade and the sunset, and its own Comment column spent seven years arguing with free verse rather than printing it. That is exactly what makes the poems gathered here worth having together: they were not the programme, they were what got through Read against the complete issue sequence, the selection makes modernism visible as a dispersed pressure inside Los Angeles verse culture—not a single faction, but a set of changes in image, rhythm, typography, urban subject, and the handling of inherited forms. The introduction, contents, and editorial notes are there to help, but the writing remains at the center. Readers can move straight through the book, follow a favorite author, or begin with a title that looks inviting. Each route reveals a slightly different anthology, which is one reason the volume can support both a quick first visit and a slower return.

The order offers its own route. Early entries establish the first group of voices; near the middle, Sonnet by Hildegarde Flanner changes the view; the closing stretch reaches I See a Star by May Williams Ward. Reading in order reveals echoes between pieces, while browsing by title or author makes the book useful for quick discovery. Neither approach requires a scholarly guide. The anthology works best when a familiar name leads toward an unfamiliar one, or when a poem encountered by chance becomes the reason to explore another issue or another book.

Among the people represented are Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Weare Holbrook, Pauline Barrington, Ernest Dexter, D. B. Kimball, Rolfe Humphries, Hazel Farkasch, Bernardine Algert, Edna Goit Brintnall, and Eda Lu Walton, with 79 more contributors included elsewhere in the book. The catalog connects their work with Los Angeles literary culture, American poetry, Little magazines, California, Desert, and Sea and coast. These terms help with searching, but they do not set limits on what a reader may find. Brian Kim Stefans prepared the volume for Text/Tech Journals, with Los Angeles, California given as its place of publication. The aim is simple: bring scattered material together, identify it clearly, and let readers make their own connections.

A good first route is to read Gaydiang by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, turn next to Sonnet by Hildegarde Flanner, and then try I See a Star by May Williams Ward. From there, the contents and contributor list can guide a more personal path. Reader’s edition: 216 PDF pages. The digital reading edition uses a consistent page size and clear typography so that the material can be read on screen or downloaded without losing its order. Source scans used during preparation remain private and are not part of the public upload. What the reader receives is the finished editorial volume: a generous introduction to the journal, a useful reference, and an invitation to keep following the writers who appear in its pages.

Contributors
Publication details
Full contents
  • Gaydiang — Ruth Comfort Mitchell [Poem]
  • Quid Iuvat Ornato — Weare Holbrook [Poem]
  • Redondo by the Sea — Pauline Barrington [Poem]
  • High Noon on the Slough — Ernest Dexter [Poem]
  • [The Western Pegasus Is an Uncut — D. B. Kimball [Poem]
  • On the Overland — Rolfe Humphries [Poem]
  • Risus Eram Positis — Weare Holbrook [Poem]
  • September Nights — Hazel Farkasch [Poem]
  • Mist — Bernardine Algert [Poem]
  • Los Angeles — Pauline Barrington [Poem]
  • Chinatown — Edna Goit Brintnall [Poem]
  • In the Telephone Book — Eda Lu Walton [Poem]
  • Streetscape — Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey [Poem]
  • Pictures on My Japanese Fan — Georgia Rowles [Poem]
  • February — Rolfe Humphries [Poem]
  • The Drifter’s Wife — Weare Holbrook [Poem]
  • Montana Wives — Gwendolen Haste [Poem]
  • Prima Donna of the Negro Jazz — Ellen Coit Elliott [Poem]
  • Calcutta — Mabel W. Phillips [Poem]
  • A Late Passer — Hazel Hall [Poem]
  • Evening on Tahoe — Rolfe Humphries [Poem]
  • Summer Movement — Virgil Geddes [Poem]
  • Biography — Gwendolyn Haste [Poem]
  • Ching Loo Dreams — Jack Hyatt, Jr [Poem]
  • The Desert Passes — Cornelia Meade Scarborough [Poem]
  • Spell of Granite — John Drury [Poem]
  • Chamber Music — R. Ellsworth Larson [Poem]
  • Contemporary Literature — Hugo Folliard [Poem]
  • Tsi Ouan Wishes to Believe in — Paul Eldridge [Poem]
  • Pursuit — Hazel Hall [Poem]
  • The Almond Blossoms — Bertha McE. Knipe [Poem]
  • Wheels and Wings — Jessica Nelson North [Poem]
  • The Gallant Warrior — Belle Turnbull [Poem]
  • A Study in Pastels — Ruth E. McKee [Poem]
  • Neisan — Pauline Garner Curran [Poem]
  • A Ride — Marjorie Loomis Cherry [Poem]
  • A Woman’s Diary — Belle Turnbull [Poem]
  • The Dance — Elizabeth J. Coatsworth [Poem]
  • Upon Reading Sandburg’s “Limited” — May Williams Ward [Poem]
  • Summer Sketches of Southern California — Elizabeth Davie [Poem]
  • A Pastel — Leonora F. Curtin [Poem]
  • The Belle of the Ball — Weare Holbrook [Poem]
  • Adjustment — Laura Riding Gottschalk [Poem]
  • A Typewriter — George Maxwell [Poem]
  • Post Office Sketches — Joseph Franklin Poland [Poem]
  • Purple Window Glass — Edith Miniter [Poem]
  • Careers — Medora C. Addison [Poem]
  • To a Photograph in a Show-Case Near Hull — Arthur H. Nethercot [Poem]
  • The Progress of Youth — Anna Kalfus Spero [Poem]
  • The Woman of Windy Flat — Gwendolen Haste [Poem]
  • Spring River: Flowers and Moon at Night — Chang Yo-hsu [Poem]
  • Tankas from the Japanese — Roy Temple House [Poem]
  • Quarry Workmen — Virgil Geddes [Poem]
  • In a Railway Station — Mary Sinton Leitch [Poem]
  • Gas Well Blow-Out — Martha Webster [Poem]
  • Wind Prints of a Dancer — Charmian von Wiegand [Poem]
  • Sonnet — Hildegarde Flanner [Poem]
  • Hand in Sunlight — Hazel Hall [Poem]
  • Two French Towns — William E. Scotten, Jr [Poem]
  • Three Sketches — E. Richard Shipp [Poem]
  • Threnody — Weare Holbrook [Poem]
  • Sestina of the Spieler — John Northern Hilliard [Poem]
  • The Mill — Beulah May [Poem]
  • Autumn, New Mexico — Ruth Lechlitner [Poem]
  • Beauty Trembled Close — George H. Dillon [Poem]
  • Dawn — William E. Scotten, Jr [Poem]
  • River Songs — Norma Miller [Poem]
  • The Color of the Night — Beulah May [Poem]
  • Inland — Joan Dareth Prosper [Poem]
  • Ether — Mary Brennan Clapp [Poem]
  • Two Sonnets — Paul Tanaquil [Poem]
  • Giovanni Malatesta — Miriam Allen de Ford [Poem]
  • Earthquake — Richard A. Summers [Poem]
  • On Guard — Wilson O. Clough [Poem]
  • Paulo Majora Canamus — Paul Tanaquil [Poem]
  • Chrysanthemums — Lucy Hale Sturges [Poem]
  • To One Grown Blasé — Wilson O. Clough [Poem]
  • The Artist Receives Notice of a Bequest — Patterson Greene [Poem]
  • The Parable of Deepness — Vachel Lindsay [Poem]
  • In a Cathedral — Alaine Boswell [Poem]
  • City Rivers — Frances Wierman [Poem]
  • Defiance — Mollie Prager [Poem]
  • The Orient Visits New York — Chi-Hwang Chu and Edna Worthley Underwood [Poem]
  • Montana Lake — Robert E. Wade, Jr [Poem]
  • Variations and Fugue on a Well-Known — Justus Grun [Poem]
  • Bitter Creek — Geraldine Seelemire [Poem]
  • Shelley in Our House — Jo Hartman [Poem]
  • Diathesis — Grace Stone Coates [Poem]
  • Some Mothers to Some Daughters — Sarah Foss Wolverton [Poem]
  • Translations of Original Japanese Tanka — Yorozu Tsurumi [Poem]
  • Incompatible — Irene Stewart [Poem]
  • In the Province of Shantung — B. Y. Williams [Poem]
  • Voices — Ethel Romig Fuller [Poem]
  • Wolf-Dawn — Geraldine Seelemire [Poem]
  • Dancing Girl of Utica — Ruth Clay Price [Poem]
  • The Drama’s End — Clinton Scollard [Poem]
  • Life — Porter Myron Chaffee [Poem]
  • The Clavilux — Madge Ohe [Poem]
  • Lone Willow — Dana Burnet [Poem]
  • Whistles — Henri Faust [Poem]
  • Moon-Storm — Dana Burnet [Poem]
  • Legerdemain — N. Bryllion Fagin [Poem]
  • The New Bridge — Ethel Romig Fuller [Poem]
  • Cerebral — Lilian White Spencer [Poem]
  • Bees in the Honeysuckle — Ethel Brodt Wilson [Poem]
  • Poems for a Chinese Anthology — Arthur Jonson [Poem]
  • A Warrior Returns Home — Richard Shelley [Poem]
  • Samarkand — Lucy H. Sturges [Poem]
  • Machinery — Frances Wierman [Poem]
  • An Apostrophe to the Moon — Mollie Prager [Poem]
  • Impotency — Mollie Prager [Poem]
  • I See a Star — May Williams Ward [Poem]
Rights and citation

Copyright remains with the respective authors, artists, publisher, or successors.

Copyright Status Unresolved

Rights in the individual contributions and the periodical compilation have not been fully resolved.

*Lyric West - A Modernist Anthology*. Text/Tech Journals, digital edition, 2026.