The term “speculative poetry” covers many modes of poetic creation, and members of the SF community continue to debate the exact definition of this term. Generally speaking, however, they agree with the Science Fiction Poets of America founder Suzette Haden Elgin’s description of such poetry as that which is “about a reality that is in some way different from the existing reality” and that contains elements of both science and narrative or “story” (12). They also agree that while the history of fantastic poetry, broadly defined, extends back to the Odyssey and Beowulf, modern speculative verse emerged in the nineteenth century in tandem with widespread literacy, the professionalization of science, and the massive expansion of industrialism. For example, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, and Edgar Allen Poe experimented with new patterns of accentual verse to produce a sense of wonder (and sometimes dread) about the modern world; Walt Whitman pioneered the use of free verse to articulate his cosmic visions; and Charles Baudelaire employed symbolism to create what he called the atmosphere of modernity. Elsewhere, Robert Burns incorporated dialect into his fantastic poetry to make his world-building more persuasive, while George Gordon, Lord Byron, and John Keats updated mythic heroes and villains for modern readers.1

  Like their male counterparts, the dozens of (often wildly popular) women writers who wrote nineteenth-century fantastic verse experimented with form, dialect, and character development. They also contributed to their chosen genre in two other ways. Authors including Felicia Hemans, Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, and Adelaide Proctor drew on the “hidden world of the nineteenth-century woman” to demonstrate the power of imagination, especially as it enabled middle-class women with limited education or travel opportunities to cast themselves as the heroines of fantastic adventures (Spivack 63). For example, the female narrator of Proctor’s “Pictures in a Fire” both capitalizes on and transcends her life as a domestic angel by looking into the hearth with her child and seeing, among the flames, fantastic worlds populated by adventurous knights and powerful fairies. Here then, the narrator—and, by extension, Proctor herself—asserts both her authority to craft strange new worlds and the value of drawing on subject matter from the private sphere of the home to do so.

  In a related vein, nineteenth-century women writers such as Sara Coleridge, Jean Ingelow, and Christina Rossetti used the fantastic worlds of speculative poetry to articulate their discontent with the here and now while imagining other times and places where women become the heroes of their own stories. As the fantasy scholar Charlotte Spivack explains, “For these women, fantasy was not merely a subject but also a language. Unable to participate actively in the political and economic life of their time and unable to communicate with anyone about their hidden dreams and desires, they expressed their subjective experience of reality in the literary language of fantasy” (63). Rossetti’s often-anthologized “Goblin Market” is particularly important in this respect, as it celebrates the adventures of two young women whose journeys through the fantastic space of the goblin market allow them to test (and, in the case of the second sister, prove) the claim that feminists of their own time made regarding the ability of women to succeed in the masculine world of the public sphere.

  Given the diversity of nineteenth-century experiments with speculative verse—not to mention the prominence of the authors who engaged in them—it is no surprise that early-twentieth-century genre magazines featured poetry on a regular basis. Such poetry generally took one of two forms: light SF verse in which authors celebrated human control over nature, especially with “visions of voyaging outward among bright destinations,” or dark fantasy and horror poems in which authors spun tales of “frightful creatures and happenings” that revealed the helplessness of humans in the face of natural and supernatural forces alike (Sneyd, Fierce 4). Hugo Gernsback introduced the use of light SF verse as filler in his early radio magazines and continued this practice in Amazing Stories and other SF publications. Meanwhile the editors Edwin Baird, Farnsworth Wright, and Dorothy McIlwraith all prominently featured darker, more experimental forms of poetry in the pages of Weird Tales, a magazine dedicated to showcasing the best in genre fiction across forms.2

  The opening decades of the twentieth century also marked the appearance of SF’s first poetry group, the Cosmic or Stellar poets. Influenced by the mainstream poet George Stirling’s 1902 opus, The Testimony of the Suns, Clark Ashton Smith, Stanton A. Coblentz, and Lilith Lorraine worked both separately and together to produce a new mode of verse that would use “powerfully colorful imagery” to “express strong, and strangely universe-conscious, emotional reactions to the vastness of time and space, to futures wondrous or terrible” (Sneyd, Fierce 13). Although largely forgotten now, the Cosmic poets inspired their midcentury successors to create the first generation of SF poetry magazines, including Lorraine’s small-press publication Challenge and Orma McCormick’s fanzine Starlanes, where even letters to the editor were written in verse. They also influenced the careers of another prominent midcentury SF group: the Futurians, who counted among them the would-be authors and editors Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Judith Merril. Many Futurians tried their hand at poetry before establishing themselves in other areas of SF. Indeed, at least two—Pohl and Merril’s sometime-housemate Virginia Kidd—made their debuts with speculative verse.

  Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, twentieth-century women writers were active participants in all kinds of speculative poetry, and, indeed, their work often paid homage to those who came before them. Gernsback was particularly well known for supporting women’s participation in the SF community, so it is no surprise that he and his editorial staff featured about half a dozen women poets in the pages of Amazing and its sister magazines. The most prominent of these was Julia Boynton Green, an American poet whose accomplishments were celebrated in Frances Elizabeth Willard and Mary Ashton Rice Livermore’s 1897 treatise, American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies with over 1,400 Portraits—A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Lives and Achievements of American Women in the Nineteenth Century. In poems such as “The Night Express,” Green depicts the march of technocultural progress in a thoroughly Gernsbackian way without reference to sex or gender. However, in “Radio Revelations” and “Evolution,” she also pays homage to the female speculative poets who preceded her with poems that employ domestic settings and motifs as the starting point for fantastic adventures.

  By way of contrast, the poems published by Leah Bodine Drake in Weird Tales present readers with dark worlds where women reject human society to embrace dreadful but liberating supernatural forces. While Drake’s poetic voice pays homage to Burns and her modernization of mythic figures (especially the witch and the werewolf) is clearly in dialogue with that of Byron and Keats, she departs from her predecessors by refusing to import the values of patriarchy into her fantastic worlds. For Drake, female mythic figures are not a threat to or reward for heroic men. Rather, the heroines of “They Run Again” and “The Wood-Wife” are fully realized people who reject the company of human men for that of werewolves and demons. Like Green, Drake wrote poems, such as “Sea-Shell,” that invoked the work of her nineteenth-century female predecessors, particularly in their evocation of mundane objects that trigger fantastic flights of imagination. Taken together, Green’s and Drake’s poems illustrate the unique contributions that women made to the two poles of speculative verse most frequently featured in early-twentieth-century genre magazines.

  Women’s work as tastemakers in the ongoing development of speculative poetry is perhaps best represented by Lilith Lorraine, the pioneering SF author, editor, and publisher who is often credited with having published the first magazine dedicated entirely to SF poetry (Challenge) and the first book of SF verse (Wine of Wonder). A Christian socialist feminist and self-described Leonarda who won numerous prizes for her contributions to the arts, Lorraine began her career as a prose fiction writer for the Gernsbackian pulps before transferring her allegiance to “prophetic” poetry, which, she claimed, “is not an escape but a challenge, not a daydream but a blueprint, not the Swan-Song of an old world but the Dawn-Song of a new” (qtd. in “Lilith Lorraine”). The diversity of Lorraine’s literary experience is reflected in the diversity of her verse: while poems such as “Earthlight on the Moon” provide readers with thoroughly Gernsbackian celebrations of human progress, others such as “The Acolytes” demonstrate her skill at conveying a sense of cosmic horror. Still other Lorraine poems, such as “Men Keep Strange Trysts,” demonstrate her belief that SF can and should provide political critique as well.

  Women poets were also active participants in fan culture. When genre readers began to produce fanzines in the 1930s, “the presence of poetry in the pulp magazines they read … made the idea of using poetry in their own publications seem … natural” (Sneyd, Elsewhen n.p.). Moreover, the prominence of women poets in the pulp magazines seems to have made the idea of featuring them in amateur publications natural as well. Following in the footsteps of Green and Lorraine, Virginia Kidd dreamed in verse of young people, scientists, and other visionaries working together to build better futures for all. Like other Futurians, Kidd published just one short, untitled SF poem early in her career before moving on to work as a literary agent and editor. But she carried the lessons she learned from Lorraine and other female speculative poets with her throughout her career. Kidd is often celebrated for her advocacy of strong-minded female (and often overtly feminist) authors, and she was instrumental in publishing the new generation of literarily trained and politically active poets who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the New Wave movement.

  Meanwhile, the poems published in the Acolyte by Tigrina—the pen name of the SF fan and pioneering lesbian journalist Edith Eyde—present readers with dark worlds where supernaturally talented women are persecuted for their differences. Like Drake, Tigrina continues the tradition of updating mythic figures to reflect feminist rather than patriarchal values. But she takes this process a step further than her professional counterpart. When Tigrina’s witches and vampires reject human men, they do not turn to their supernatural male counterparts for comfort or company. Instead, in “Defiance” and “Affinity,” they seek out one another to create communities of like-minded women. In this respect Tigrina’s poetry is much like that of Sara Coleridge and Christina Rossetti before her, using fantastic spaces contiguous with the real world to critically assess how women are prevented from exercising power while imagining how they might use their unique talents to overcome oppression and become the heroines of their own life stories. Taken together, the women featured in this chapter of Sisters of Tomorrow serve as an important bridge between nineteenth-century experiments with speculative verse and modern SF poetic practice. Writers such as Green, Drake, and Tigrina updated the poetic techniques first developed by Byron, Keats, Proctor, and Rossetti to assert women’s scientific and social authority in the modern world. Meanwhile, Lorraine and Kidd incorporated the youthful energy and expansionist vision of the Gernsbackian pulp magazines into their own verse, demonstrating how poets might join scientists and prose SF authors in the shared project of preparing readers for what was sure to be an increasingly technological and global future. While the rhymed and metered verse in which these early-twentieth-century poets wrote has fallen out of favor in modern SF poetry, the themes they addressed—including the promises and perils of technology, the wonder of the universe beyond everyday human experience, and the role of women in the creation of brave new worlds—are still central to SF in all its forms today.

  JULIA BOYNTON GREEN (1861–1957) was an American poet whose light verse epitomized the sense of wonder often associated with early magazine SF. Born in Boston, Green briefly attended college at Wellesley and studied art in London before returning home to care for her sick mother. At this time Green began publishing poetry in local journals and the Boston Transcript. Her first book of verse, Lines and Interlines, appeared in 1887 and was described as “strikingly excellent” in Frances Elizabeth Willard and Mary Ashton Rice Livermore’s American Women … A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Lives and Achievements of American Women in the Nineteenth Century (1897).

  Subsequent life events—including marriage, an extended tour of Europe, and a permanent relocation to California in 1893—delayed Green’s next book for more than forty years. The publication of This Enchanted Coast: Verse on California Themes in 1928 (followed by Noonmark in 1936) established Green as one of what the poet Brian Kim Stefans calls a “lost generation” of poets who participated in the tradition of “Los Angeles boosterism” to encourage emigration (n.p.). But while other artists associated with this tradition uncritically celebrated the merits of West Coast life, Green’s often fantastic but always thoughtful explorations of human and technological encroachment on California’s native landscape set her apart from her peers and, in Stefans’s estimation, “could have [earned her] a national audience” (n.p.).

  Green found this national audience with her poetry for Amazing Stories and Amazing Stories Quarterly, where she was the second most frequently published poet of her day.3 The founder of Amazing, Hugo Gernsback, introduced the use of light verse (i.e., brief, often humorous poems featuring word play, striking rhyme schemes, and heavy alliteration) as filler in his radio magazines, and he continued this tradition with his SF publications. In formal terms, Green’s verse was ideally suited for such purposes. Green was an anti-modernist who railed against free verse, “and so her poetic style never much transcended what she had already developed in her youth; [her] taste for sonnets, ballads and rhyming couplets persists well into the 20th century” (Stefans n.p.). Her work was also a good match to the Amazing franchise in terms of content. Poems such as “Evolution” and “Radio Revelations” celebrate human mastery over time and space in the playful, optimistic manner often associated with Gernsbackian SF. Even Green’s more critical offerings, such as “The Night Express,” speculate about the future of human–machine relations in a thoroughly science fictional manner. By asking readers to consider what might happen if our creations became more lively than we are, Green establishes herself as part of a speculative tradition that begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and continues with writers of cyberpunk and post-singularity SF today.4

  While Green wrote about the same range of scientific and technological topics that fascinated her male counterparts, she often used the techniques of her nineteenth-century female predecessors to stake claims for women in the modern world. Like poems written by Felicia Hemans and Adelaide Proctor nearly one hundred years earlier, Green’s “Radio Revelations” uses the encounter with an everyday domestic object as the occasion to exercise a truly fantastic female imagination. However, while Hemans and Proctor seized upon traditionally feminine objects such as laundry and the hearth to enable their flights of proto-feminist fancy, Green explores how feminine encounters with masculine objects (such as the titular radio) might enable women to imaginatively recast the entire universe as domestic comedy. Green also follows the precedent set by authors such as Jean Ingelow and Christina Rossetti by making women the heroes of their own adventures. This is most obvious in “Radio Revelations,” but it is also central to “Evolution,” which asks readers to accept modern theories of human development based not on intellectual fads that come and go but on the lasting gut instincts of the narrator herself. Thus Green makes the female poet with sensibility—rather than the male scientist with sense—the true champion of modernity. This was certainly true of Green as a poet herself: while contemporary readers might find her writing style and celebration of domesticity to be distinctly old-fashioned, Green’s insistence on playing with shifts in perspective and questions of gendered authority are very much at the heart of modern feminist SF poetry as it is written by Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Jane Yolen today.5

  “The Night Express”

  Amazing Stories, July 1931

  Man’s scanty merits from his faults I sift

  Disheartened at the residue. When—hark!

  There goes the night express, nicknamed “The Lark”!

  I feel my heart grow big—grow light—and lift!

  Our sinner still has wonders in his gift.

  Listen to that racing engine’s joyous bark—

  A steel-thewed greyhound speeding through the dark,

  Staunch, steady, proud, magnificently swift!

  The erring human gentles to his need

  Wind, water, lightning; will he miss the goal

  Of mental strife? Or being of the breed

  Of conquerors will he lose his grip of soul?

  Master of metals, motors, wheels, and wings,

  Will Man descend to be the thrall of Things?

  “Evolution”

  Amazing Stories, August 1931

  Long have wise folk a baffling secret sought—

  The mystery of human origins.