Lovell Bearse Pemberton — Collected Poems

Lovell Bearse Pemberton was one of early Los Angeles’s most improbable literary figures: an electrical engineer who helped build the region’s streetcar systems, an inventor and architect whose buildings still mark the South Bay, and a poet who recast Greek myth for an industrial and democratic age. From Sappho and Other Songs (1895) and Prometheus Unbound (1896) to The Dance at the Spring and Other Poems (1929), his writing joins pageantry, satire, evolutionary speculation, and a fierce suspicion of tyranny. This edition gathers the poetry books in chronological sections, prints later revisions only when they materially clarify the earlier text, and restores stanza structure, dramatic speakers, and intentional indentation from the original scans. It also places the poems beside the electrical, architectural, civic, and Bahá’í-associated journeys that shaped Pemberton’s unusually mobile career.