Ruth Le Prade — Collected Poems

Ruth Le Prade made poems into seeds, arguments, memorials, and instruments of rescue. Her Whitman-inflected A Woman Free, and Other Poems joined feminism, socialism, bodily freedom, comradeship, and mystical faith; during the First World War she opposed conscription and repression, then edited Debs and the Poets around the imprisoned Eugene V. Debs. At her Los Angeles home she created the Poets Garden, where Edwin Markham, John Masefield, Moon Kwan, and visiting writers planted trees and turned poetry into civic ritual. Later books brought grief and political commitment into a quieter lyric music: her son died as a German prisoner of war, and she successfully campaigned to save Wesley Robert Wells from execution. Collected Poems restores her available books and anthology work, revealing a California poet for whom the imagination mattered most when it entered public life.