THIS IS MISS LANG

The brief life and forgotten legacy of a remarkable American poet.

- BY ANTHONY LANE

The American poet Violet Ranney Lang was born in 1924 and died in 1956, of Hodgkin's lymphoma, at the age of thirty-two. Although last year marked the centenary of her birth, the occasion passed without much ceremony. “The Miraculous Season,” a selection of Lang's verse, was published in the U.K. by Carcanet Press, but it will not appear in the U.S. until next April, under the aegis of NYRB Poets. In her native land, Lang remains half honored, at best, or guarded like a secret by a devoted few.

The secret deserves to be shared. No tyro, Lang may have been cut off in her prime, but her prime is indisputably her own. Her singular blend of severity and skittishness is unrivalled in the poetry of her peers. Mind you, the task of presenting Lang to a larger public is not without its pitfalls, as she herself was gleefully aware:

This is Miss Lang, Miss V.R. Lang. The Poet, or
The Poetess . . . Bynum, would you
introduce
Someone else as this is J.P. Hatchet
Who is a Roman Catholic? No. Then
don't do
That to me again. It's not an employment,
It's a private religion. Who's that over there?

These lines by Lang, tart and forbidding, arise—complete with spacings, as awkward as gaps in conversation—in a sequence titled “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home.” The scene, she tells us at the start, is a cocktail party (“I'll wear pale green silk stockings”). It is typical of Lang that she comes across as being both quite at ease in such a setting and all too eager to smash the social rules. If the young Katharine Hepburn had been so inclined, she might have written in such a voice. Call it screwball verse. Yet the light volubility is stilled and clouded by another mood entirely: “Attempt no descriptions./Talk about flames. Suicides. Terror in sleep.”