Ruth Stone

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Wendy Barker

Born 8 June 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia, in her grandparents’

house, Ruth Perkins Stone was surrounded by relatives who wrote poetry, painted, practiced

law, and taught school. Intrigued by the large collection of books in her grandparents’

library, Stone began reading at three. She attended kindergarten and first grade in

Roanoke, but then moved to Indianapolis where she lived with her father’s parents. Living

at that time in her paternal grandparents’ home in Indianapolis was Stone’s Aunt

Harriette, who delighted in playing writing and drawing games with her niece. Together

they wrote poems and drew comical cartoons: Ruth Stone has said that Aunt Harriette was

the best playmate she ever had. The poet’s mother, Ruth Ferguson Perkins, also encouraged

her daughter’s "play." For her, too, poetry was an essential ingredient of life:

while nursing Ruth as a baby, she read the works of Tennyson out loud. And as her child

grew, she openly delighted in her daughter’s irrepressible creativity.

Writing, poetry, drawing, and music surrounded the young poet while she grew up in

Indianapolis. Her father–Roger McDowell Perkins–was a drummer, who often practiced at

home. As Stone tells it, on the nights he was not gambling, he would bring home an elegant

box of the best chocolates and some new classical records. There would be music and candy

and he would read out loud to them, sometimes from the Bible, sometimes from humorous

pieces by Bill Nye. He was "crazy about funny stuff," says Stone. "Funny

stuff" was, in fact, a large part of the pattern of family life in Indianapolis. The

poet remembers her uncles at dinner parties who told one fascinating story after another,

convulsing the family with their humor. Every member of her father’s family had an

extraordinary sense of the ridiculous–they saw right through the superficial.

And yet, this family of English descent also played its part in polite Indianapolis

society. The poet’s paternal grandfather was a senator, and in keeping with the

familial social position, his wife gave frequent formal tea parties. Stone remembers

pouring tea, learning to be a lady–something, she says, she later "had to learn to

forget."

From "Mapping Ruth Stone’s Life and Art" in Dictionary of Literary

Biography, Volume 105. Ed. R.S. Gwynn. Copyright . 1991 by Gale Research, Inc.

Jan Freeman

At the age of nineteen, Stone moved to Illinois with her first husband, a chemist.

While living in Illinois, she met and later married the poet and novelist Walter Stone. In

1952, she moved with her husband and three daughters, Marcia, Phoebe, and Abigail, to

Vassar College, where Walter Stone was offered a teaching position in the English

department. At Vassar, Stone composed the poems for her first book, In an

Iridescent Time (1959). During this period, she won Poetry’s Bess Hokin prize and the

Kenyon Review Fellowship in Poetry. With the prize money from the Kenyon Review, Stone

traveled alone to Vermont and bought a house where she could write and her family could

spend the summers. Stone’s life changed dramatically when, in 1959, on sabbatical from

Vassar, Walter Stone moved with Ruth Stone and their young daughters to England. In

England, Walter Stone committed suicide. For the next decade, Ruth Stone moved in and out

of periods of deep depression and despair, and Walter Stone’s life and death became a

nearly constant presence in the poetry of Ruth Stone.

In 1963, Stone was awarded a two-year Radcliffe Institute fellowship, and from 1963 to

1965, she worked on poems for her second collection, Topography and Other Poems (1971),

and developed close ties to other Radcliffe fellows, such as Maxine Kumin and Tillie

Olsen. After the Radcliffe Institute, Stone taught creative writing at many universities

throughout the United States, including Indiana University at Bloomington; the University

of California, Davis; New York University; and Old Dominion University. Currently she is

Professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Between teaching

engagements, Stone has lived in the Vermont house she purchased with the Kenyon Review

Fellowship money in 1957. Known as the "mother poet" to many contemporary women

writers, she is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Shelley Memorial Award

(1964), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1971 and 1975), the Delmore Schwartz Award (1983), the

Whiting Writer’s Award (1986), and the Paterson Poetry Prize (1988). Returning over and

over to the themes of loss and death, Ruth Stone’s poems are ultimately emblems of

survival. Combining lyricism with a poignant mix of humor and tragedy, she manipulates the

emotions of her audience by opening them with laughter, then shocking them with sorrow.

Stone is a feminist poet who uses poetry to boldly

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