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\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nTo revel in the beauty wrought\u2014
\nThe perfect utterance of a thought.
\n–Elizabeth O\u2019Rourke Koenig, \u201cI\u2019ve Had My Dreams\u201d<\/p>\n
Heart of the Insurance Capital<\/h5>\n
1920s Hartford presents a hard exterior. We associate 1920s Hartford with business \u2013 particularly the insurance business, with its monetary calculations of risks, accidents, and tragedies. Even with art, we associate 1920s Hartford with the modernism of Chick Austin and Wallace Stevens, both of whom became world famous for a kind of art that, despite its own beauty, was for common people as baffling and impenetrable as insurance claims.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we should associate 1920s Hartford as well with Eleanor O\u2019Rourke Koenig.<\/p>\n
Koenig was a poet and editor who fashioned a populist burgeoning of poetry in the Insurance Capital of America. She published two books of poetry in the 1920s and attracted attention from Poetry<\/em> magazine founder Harriet Monroe, Irish Renaissance poet AE, and the towering British novelist Thomas Hardy. Koenig initiated and conducted a twice-weekly column in The Hartford Courant<\/em> dedicated to publishing poetry submissions of ordinary people and keeping the state abreast of poetry news.<\/p>\n In her eight years as editor of The Poet\u2019s Column, Koenig facilitated the publication of hundreds of poems in The Courant<\/em> that demonstrate the beating heart of the people \u2013 their joys, their hurts, their loves, their fears.<\/p>\n Reviews of her poetry in The Courant<\/em> suggest that Hartford embraced Koenig as their own. \u201cHartford cannot forego its claim of pride in her noble talent,\u201d wrote book critic Elizabeth N. Case (Dec 22, 1929). Case congratulated herself on being \u201cone of the first to realize that here, in our own city<\/em>, was burgeoning one of the high poetic talents of our day\u201d (italics added). Courant<\/em> writer Julia S. Older noted the contrast between Koenig\u2019s Irish verse and the urban exterior of Hartford, saying, \u201cHartford she finds a quiet study in which to write verse that has nothing to do with people in cities, modern life or insurance\u201d (Feb 25, 1928).<\/p>\n Both as editor of The Poet\u2019s Column and in her own verse, Koenig offers the “everyman\u201d reader a pathway to the mystical beauty of poetry. “To revel in the beauty wrought—\/ The perfect utterance of a thought\u201d; this line from her poetic reflection on John Keats\u2019 \u201cEndymion\u201d may well express Koenig\u2019s impetus to write. It also defines one of the central pleasures of reading and writing poetry.<\/p>\n A Courant<\/em> review of Koenig\u2019s second book praises her \u201cpure poetry\u201d: \u201cHere is a book which opens wide \u2013 with a generous, welcoming gesture \u2013 the gates leading to the realm of pure poetry, and the lover of pure poetry enters in, with a sense of reverent gratitude to the poet\u201d (Courant<\/em>, Dec 22, 1929). By \u201cpure poetry,\u201d the reviewer has in mind lines like these from Koenig\u2019s much celebrated \u201cAfter an Old Irish Meter”:<\/p>\n A terrible, terrible grief is this, it seems; Koenig was also praised for the lyric quality of her poetry and its ability to evoke poignant images of nature, as demonstrated in these lines from \u201cWindow View\u201d:<\/p>\n A sky so neutral, cloudless as to spill Mostly, however, Koenig\u2019s poetry is praised for its Irishness. \u201cExaltation, in simple language, of simple things seen in a rock-bottom way with all the brooding fancy and humor of an Irish temperament\u201d is how Older describes her poetry. Case describes it as \u201ca poetry with the authentic note of Ireland, with the strangled sob, the bold revealing phrase, the irresistible glamour of the Celtic gift of emotional expression\u201d (Dec 19, 1929). Monroe, whose influential magazine Poetry<\/em> published several of Koenig’s poems, wrote that her poetry is \u201clike Irish voices lilting over the morning\u201d (Oct 9, 1935).<\/p>\n Details of Koenig\u2019s life are not easy to find. Most of what can be pieced together comes from Older\u2019s 1928 biographical piece in The Courant<\/em>. According to Older, Eleanor Constance O\u2019Rourke (records also indicate Sheehan as her maiden name) grew up in Western Massachusetts, either living with or often visiting her Irish-immigrant grandmother in a humble home in the foothills of Mount Tom in Easthampton. The days spent exploring the woods and streams there gave young Eleanor a special appreciation for nature that would feature prominently in her poetry, and the nights spent by the fireside listening to her elders and the occasional traveler tell stories was another deep influence.<\/p>\n \u201cCome in From the Rain,\u201d which seems to have been a favorite among critics and general readers alike, is based on actual encounters in her grandmother\u2019s house and is a tribute to her grandmother\u2019s Irish hospitality. The title poem for her first volume of poetry, \u201cHerb Woman,\u201d was inspired by a \u201ctraveling doctor\u201d who visited her grandmother\u2019s home when Eleanor was ill and prescribed some bitter herbs.<\/p>\n Eleanor attended convent school and later an academy, showing an early interest in poetry. Some of her poems were published in local newspapers when she was in her early teens. Eleanor\u2019s father shared his love for literature with her and she came to adore Keats and Irish poets.<\/p>\n As an adult, Eleonor did \u201cverbatim work\u201d (transcribing speech to written text) for a short period in Boston, where she met William T. Koenig of Hartford. The couple married and settled in Hartford, where Eleanor continued this work. Eleanor and William appear to have had only one child, Eleanor Christine Koenig, and the couple lived at 183 Seymour Street until their deaths.<\/p>\n The critical emphasis on her Irishness seems to overshadow the feminism expressed in Koenig\u2019s poetry. The dominant theme of \u201cDecree\u201d and \u201cThe Road\u201d is empathy for women trapped in marriages with loveless and even abusive men, as in these opening lines of \u201cDecree\u201d:<\/p>\n This thing that you have done to me, \u201cThe Road\u201d is an intense verse story of a young wife contemplating escape from her abusive husband. Koenig evokes the paradoxical emotions so common in abusive relationships:<\/p>\n At first, in terror she had almost swooned, Other poems like \u201cSecond Marriage,\u201d \u201cBoccaccio\u2019s Francesca,\u201d and \u201cConquest\u201d reflect upon the dignity of women who carve out their own space in otherwise limited lives. The short poem \u201cConquest\u201d envisions a woman in a room she has just swept clean:<\/p>\n Plumb in the middle\u2014 Koenig wrote The Legend of Hartford<\/em> in recognition of Connecticut\u2019s tercentenary celebrations. The poem paints the arrival of European settlers in biblical terms with Thomas Hooker as the central figure: \u201cCrusader, Utopian Dreamer, Puritan Divine.\u201d Throughout the poem, the speaker calls upon the reader to imagine being there at the establishing of Hartford: \u201cWhere Hooker preached \u2013 think what it must have been\/ To have seen this man, to have heard this orator.\u201d The poem culminates in a reflection on the Fundamental Orders establishing governance at the consent of the people and calls on the present people of Hartford, now 300 years later, to be thankful.<\/p>\n The Irish label helped establish Koenig\u2019s place in the literary world, but it may also have erected barriers to her creative ambitions. The one full review of Legend in The Hartford Courant<\/em>, for instance, is lukewarm toward her poem because of its lack of Irish charm. The critic complains that in Legend<\/em> Koenig \u201cdeserts her natural field\u201d (Dec 29, 1935). Koenig planned two volumes to follow Legend, both related to Connecticut, and one exploring Native American peoples. She was reportedly well on her way to finishing these projects when Legend<\/em> was published. It appears, however, that these books never saw the light of day.<\/p>\n Koenig\u2019s Poet’s Column eventually converted from a twice-weekly to a weekly occurrence, and in 1936, soon after publishing Legend<\/em>, she stepped down as editor. The last mention of Koenig as a poet in The Courant<\/em> comes in an event announcement in 1941, which says of Koenig, \u201cher Irish dramatic poems and verse dealing with the early history of the state are widely known.\u201d<\/p>\n Koenig appears one more time in The Courant 14 years later: \u201cMrs. Eleanor Constance Sheehan Koenig of 183 Seymour St., wife of William T. Koenig, died Thursday at Hartford Hospital\u201d (July 9, 1955).<\/p>\n What happened to Eleanor Koenig the \u201cwidely known\u201d Hartford poet? Why was her name \u2013 once synonymous with the poetry scene in Hartford \u2013 now forgotten? There are no articles of remembrance and no tributes from readers.<\/p>\n The opening lines of \u201cEndymion,\u201d the Keats poem Koenig admires in \u201cI\u2019ve Had My Dreams,\u201d is a meditation on the lasting quality of art: \u201cA thing of beauty is a joy for ever\u201d that \u201cwill never\/ Pass into nothingness.\u201d Perhaps now, nearly a century after this Hartford poet faded from view, the poetry of Eleanor O\u2019Rourke Koenig will be rediscovered and \u2013 this time \u2013 remain with us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * NOTE:<\/strong> What little is published about her life reveals a variety of names and contradictory dates \u2013 but the Courant<\/em>\u2019s habit of including the poet\u2019s address in announcements and in death notices verifies this is the same person. Koenig published sometimes as Eleanor O\u2019Rourke Koenig and sometimes as Eleanor C. Koenig. Her obituary, presumably written by a family member, refers to her as Eleanor Constance Sheehan Koenig, and reports that she left behind a brother and sister, both surnamed Sheehan. Case, in emphasizing her Irishness, states she was \u201cborn O\u2019Rourke\u201d (1929). The Courant<\/em>\u2019s full obituary (July 9, 1955) states that she was born in Easthampton, Massachusetts, which agrees with Julia Older\u2019s account based on her interview with the poet in 1928. The obituary states that Koenig lived in Hartford “over 60 years,\u201d which would place her move to Hartford in the 1890s. But this does not align with Older\u2019s account. According to Older’s 1928 article, Koenig was in her early 30\u2019s at the time and had lived in Hartford for \u201cover ten years,\u201d placing her move to Hartford as late as 1917 and her birth around 1895.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n from Herb Woman and Other Poems<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n from Two on an Old Pathway<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n The Legend of Hartford<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n Eleanor O’Rourke Koenig – Biographical and Critical Sources<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hartford\u2019s Poet for the People Written by Jeffrey Partridge To revel in the beauty wrought\u2014 The perfect utterance of a thought. –Elizabeth O\u2019Rourke Koenig, \u201cI\u2019ve Had My Dreams\u201d Heart of the Insurance Capital 1920s Hartford presents a hard exterior. We associate 1920s Hartford with business \u2013 particularly the insurance business, with its monetary calculations of … Continue reading Eleanor O\u2019Rourke Koenig (c.1895 – 1955)<\/span> A Writer of Pure Poetry<\/h5>\n
\nThe core of all beautiful things, I think, is frozen now.<\/p>\n
\nMeek pathos on the walk that leads a way
\nAcross a field\u2014<\/p>\nPiecing Together Her Life Story*<\/h5>\n
Feminist Perspectives<\/h5>\n
\nRankled injustice meetly in my mind,
\nAnd long ago I could have turned to flee<\/p>\n
\nThen came the headlong sorrow for his fault,
\nMaternal sorrow, as for a spoiled child…<\/p>\n
\nThere she would stand
\nHolding a broom
\nAnd the world in her hand.<\/p>\nThe Legend of Hartford<\/em><\/h5>\n
So Soon Forgotten<\/h5>\n
Anthology Selections<\/h4>\n