Hildegarde Flanner

Hildegarde Flanner (born June 3?, 1899, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died May 27, 1987, Calistoga, California) was an American poet, essayist, and playwright known for her traditional poems that conjured images of nature and the California landscape and spoke to her passion for the environment.

Flanner was the youngest of three daughters born to Francis William and Mary Ellen Hockett Flanner, who brought up their children in a progressive and intellectual household with a strong appreciation for the arts. (Each of the sisters chose creative career paths. The eldest, Marie, became a musician and composer in New York, and the middle sister, Janet, became a well-respected writer for The New Yorker magazine, writing under the name “Genêt.”) In 1912 their father committed suicide, leaving the family a large sum of money to live on. Upon graduation from high school, Flanner briefly attended Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia, and then moved to California, where she continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1919.

Flanner’s early poetry was autobiographical, written through the lens of her religious upbringing. While still in school, she wrote “Young Girl” (1920), which received a school prize awarded annually to the best unpublished poem. Shortly after receiving the prize, her first volume of poetry, Young Girl and Other Poems, was published, as was her one-act play, Mansions (both 1920). A poem titled “Communion” appeared in Poetry magazine in 1921. That same year it was included in a small collection called This Morning (1921), with a cover designed by Frederick Monhoff, an artist and graduate of Berkeley, whom Flanner married in 1926. Monhoff went on to illustrate and design nearly all of Flanner’s publications throughout her career.

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She and her mother, who had gone to live with her, experienced the devastating Berkeley fire of 1923, and she wrote a memoir, “Wildfire: Berkeley, 1923,” in 1974 that was published in The New Yorker. She also wrote of that event in the sonnet “To My Books Who Perished by Fire,” published in Poetry in 1927. Following the fire, which destroyed the home she shared with her mother (along with hundreds more), they moved to Altadena, California, near Los Angeles. As Flanner became more rooted in California, she increasingly drew upon nature in her poetry and became more specific about her natural environment, often writing of flowers, plants, and the landscape, as in poems such as “The Snail ” (1928), “White Magnolia Blossom” (before 1929), “The Owl” (before 1929), and “Pacific Winter” (1929), all published in Time’s Profile (1929), which was illustrated and designed by Monhoff.

Flanner’s poems—as well as essays, reviews, and articles on her travels in the Southwest—were published widely in periodicals throughout the 1920s and ’30s. Much of Flanner’s work in the time leading up to World War II expressed anxious anticipation and fear of natural and human disaster, especially in poems such as “Hawk Is a Woman” and “Rattlesnake.” Those poems, and 22 more, were issued in her collection If There Is Time, a New Directions Publishing House “Poet of the Month” publication (1942). After that publication Flanner’s poetry writing slowed down, and her focus on the environment became more central. To escape what she saw as the rampant industrialization and ubanization of southern California, Flanner and Monhoff moved to the Napa Valley in 1962.

After a long hiatus Flanner published In Native Light (1970), a collection that included many poems from the 1920s and ’30s reprinted alongside engravings by her husband. Three more volumes were published before Flanner’s death: The Hearkening Eye (1979), a collection that also included a selection of early and new poems; Brief Cherishing: A Napa Valley Harvest (1985), a series of four essays illustrated by Monhoff’s engravings; and At the Gentle Mercy of Plants (1986), which reprinted her 1974 essay on the Berkeley fire and included the essay “Roots and Hedges” and some poems inspired by her garden.