Ethelean Tyson Gaw — Drums of El Dorado and Other Poems

23 January 1877, Pennsylvania – 29 January 1962, Los Angeles, California

Ethelean Tyson Gaw built a literary life out of forms meant to be shared: a class poem in Philadelphia, a prize-winning war song, pageants, lectures, musical settings, a biblical drama written with her husband Allison Gaw, and two years of joint ownership and editing at The Lyric West. Her 1951 collection Drums of El Dorado and Other Poems gathers love lyrics, California history and landscape, poems of war and international order, addresses to other poets, travel poems, comedy, religion, technology, aging, and death. Its California sequence celebrates Cabrillo, Drake, Serra, oil, dams, and westward settlement in language that also reveals the exclusions of booster-era regional myth. This edition resets all fifty-nine poems—not the fifty-one counted in an earlier dossier—and restores the full book from its ninety-six-page source scan. It also resets all six Gaw poems preserved in the complete local excerpt from the 1923 Second Anthology of Verse, retaining repeated poems as chronological witnesses and recovering “Le Jour D’Amour,” which was not collected in 1951. The original order, divisions, lineation, dates, dedications, and notes are retained while scan noise and unmistakable transcription errors are removed.

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Catalogue

Poetry Clubs & Civic Culture

Associations

Editors and Magazines Poetry and Civic Clubs Teaching and Mentorship The Lyric West Verse Drama Women Who Built the Scene

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Gaw, Ethelean Tyson. “Battle Song of Democracy.” The Clubwoman, Dec. 1917. Later titled “Battle Song—1917.”

———. “A Barnegat Love-Song.” Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 68, no. 2, Aug. 1920, p. 218.

———. “Robbed.” Los Angeles Times, 1 Apr. 1920. Reprinted in Selected Poems on Woodrow Wilson (1926) and Drums of El Dorado (1951).

———. “The Minor Poet.” Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 72, no. 6, Dec. 1922, p. 668.

———. “Alice Meynell, an Appreciation.” The Lyric West, July–Aug. 1923, pp. 29–30.

———. “The Desert.” The Lyric West, Oct. 1923, p. 8.

———. Drums of El Dorado and Other Poems. Exposition Press, 1951.

———. Festival of All Nations. Pageant-drama; advertised in 1951, text not located.

———. Chinaman’s Chance. One-act play; advertised in 1951, text not located.

———. Misty Sundown. Camas Press, 1959? Reported but unverified; no copy, catalog record, or copyright entry located.

Gaw, Allison, and Ethelean Tyson Gaw. Pharaoh’s Daughter: The Winning Biblical Play of the 1927 Contest. Longmans, Green, 1928.

Works About the Author

Brooks, Aurelia E., compiler. Browningiana in Baylor University. Baylor University Press, 1921. Entry for “I See Thee Like a Beacon Light.”

“Ethelean Tyson Gaw Obituary.” Los Angeles Times, 1 Feb. 1962, p. 89.

Leech, Ellen. “Selected Stage Secrets.” California Southland, Nov. 1925.

Library of Congress. Elinor Remick Warren Papers finding aid, Box 76, Folder 28.

“Pharaoh’s Daughter at Pasadena.” Billboard, 7 Nov. 1925.

“Pharaoh’s Daughter at Pasadena, Calif.” Billboard, 24 Oct. 1925.

Phi Mu. “The Creed Centennial.” Aglaia, summer 2016.

“Prize War Poem.” The Evergreen, Washington State College, Jan. 1918.

The Best Plays of 1925–26. Southern California season report, 31.

Who’s Who Among the Women of California. Security Publishing, 1922, pp. 601–02.

Women of the West. California section, 46.