Poems by Katherine Mansfield

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“Damn Katherine! Why can’t I be the only woman who knows how to write?” Virginia Woolf Katherine Mansfield was, most of all, a passionate spirit. Her poems are sometimes traditional, sometimes outbursts of emotion, sometimes experiments akin to prose poems. In all she manages a strange alchemy; ordinary words are somehow transformed into powerful arrows of meaning. These 69 poems were collected together and published in 1923, just after Katherine Mansfield’s death. Many had never been published before; others only in magazines. John Middleton Murry explains in his introductory note that they are effusions of what he calls her ‘exquisite spirit,’ the uniqueness of which guarantees Mansfield her permanent place in twentieth century literature.