Margaret Junkin Preston, Lexington poetess

Abstract

Even in 1950 one can enjoy reading Margaret Preston's poems, which were written for a Victorian audience. She wrote in many forms and metres, and because of this almost everyone can select from her volumes certain examples that entertain. She especially satisfies those many people who find delight in changing and alternating patterns of poetry, condemning as repetitious and monotonous works of any consistent, single-styled writer. Most of her books are divided into sections of contrasting types of poems; they are like anthologies. Because of the various metre arrangements, the reader, as he goes from verse to verse, thinks he has seen many before -- the reduced cues of lines similar to some of Longfellow's or Bryant's or Elizabeth Browning's strike a familiar note which, because it is not completely recognizable, perseveres to haunt the mind until the original reference is remembered. Margaret Preston might be called a poet of the people in the sense that Longfellow was -- both wrote for the people but were not of them; both wrote for intellectual minds as well. Yet she lacked indigenous material even though she wrote with simplification. This must explain the fact that her popularity never reached the height of his. I would not hesitate to call her eclectic, but today that word connotes an unpleasant quality, so I will reduce the harshness by saying that she was an experimenter. [From Introduction]