Eunice Tietjens

Eunice Tietjens (July 29, 1884 - September 6, 1944) was an American poet, novelist, journalist, children's author, lecturer, and editor.

Born as Eunice Strong Hammond in Chicago on July 29, 1884, she was educated in Europe and travelled heavily. She lived in Florida, New York, Japan, China and Tunisia, among other places.

Tietjens was a World War I correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in France, 1917-1918. Her poems had already begun to be published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the noted poetry magazine, around 1913. She later became publisher Harriet Monroe’s associate editor there for more than twenty-five years. Tietjens' was considered a more patient and generous editor, whose style contrasted sharply with that of Monroe, who was not known to treat would-be contributors with "kid gloves".

One collection of stories, "Burton Holmes Travel Stories: Japan, Korea and Formosa" (1924) contains lively descriptions of East Asian countries. By contemporary standards, the stories seem provincial and quaintly Eurocentric. The stories contain descriptions of nationalities and ethnicities that can be understood to be racist. Here's an excerpt:

"...For a great many years this island of Formosa was a terror that haunted all the Western sailors who sailed in those seas. The sea around it is the birthplace of terrible tropical typhoons, which spring up suddenly and sweep helpless ships onto the sharp cliffs, where they are dashed to pieces. And, before Japan tamed her tiger, if a few poor half-drowned sailors managed to land, they were usually captured by the savages who lived there and killed by them. Their heads were preserved as trophies and their bodies eaten, for these savages were cannibals."

Eunice Tietjens Head also wrote a memoir, entitled The World at My Shoulder (1938), in which she confessed her "dark lust" for the "savage pagans of the Pacific."

Marriage

Her first husband was Paul Tietjens, whom she married in 1904 and by whom she had a daughter, Janet T. Hart. They divorced in 1914 and she remarried in 1920 to Cloyd Head, playwright and theatrical director, by whom she had a son, Marshall Head.

Death

She died in 1944 in her hometown of Chicago, aged 60 from cancer (as perTime Magazine).

Poems

Tietjens' poems include:

• Old Friendship
• The Steam Shovel
• Presence of Eternity
• The Great Man
• The Most Sacred Mountain
• The Drug Clerk
• The Bacchante to Her Babe

Papers

Her papers may be found at:

• The Newberry Library
• Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections
• 60 West Walton Street
• Chicago, Illinois 60610-7324

External links

• Works by Eunice Tietjens at Project Gutenberg
• Intimate Circles | Eunice Tietjens at highway49.library.yale.edu
• Eunice Tietjens at Old Poetry at oldpoetry.com
• Eunice Tietjens Papers online inventory, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois
• Eunice Tietjens Papers-Additions online inventory, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois