Esteemed poet Eleanor Taylor dies

Lauded poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, 91, whose career took a backseat to family and whose poems used daily events to examine life, died Friday.

The long-time Charlottesville resident published her first collection of poetry in 1960 and received a spate of honors over the past two decades, including the Virginia Prize for Poetry, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, given by the Poetry Foundation to honor a poet’s lifetime achievements.

Taylor was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2009.

The poet was known as a quiet, genteel and reclusive person who often worked in her garden and yard, occasionally invited friends for tea and sent notes of encouragement to other writers and friends.

“It’s hard for me to have a perspective on Mom, we had a great relationship,” said Ross Taylor, her son. He said a quote from Gustave Flaubert summed up her approach to writing.

“He said ‘be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ Mother wasn’t violent in her work but she was original and unflinching,” her son said.

Taylor was born in Norwood, N.C., graduated in 1940 from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and studied at Vanderbilt University. She taught school in North Carolina before turning to poetry. In 1943 she married Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Peter Taylor.

Taylor’s career was always second to her family and the Taylors often moved as part of her husband’s career as a university professor.

“My father was very social and they would go to parties, but she wasn’t social on her own. She preferred to be in her garden,” Ross Taylor said.

Some of Taylor’s gardening experiences led to poems investigating life’s larger lessons. Once she accidentally trapped herself under the back porch and couldn’t get the door open to get out. While there she ruminated on her predicament and wrote “The Accidental Prisoner:”

I think I left a burner on.

Could the firemen hear me above the basso

of their radios?

Will I get thirsty? Miss lunch?

One could relieve oneself,

there’s privacy.

Taylor’s work appeared in literary magazines including the Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry magazine and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her 2010 book “Captive Voices” was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

“Her work is quirky, intelligent, passionate and profound,” said poet Jean Valentine, most recently the State Poet of New York and the author of “The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor.”

“She’s becoming more and more known among poets,” Valentine said. “She’s lived a quiet life in a time when there were so many poetic careers taking off. She’s become more and more admired.”

Valentine and Ross Taylor both said the poet’s life and personality was summed up in “Always Reclusive,” one of the poems in “Captive Voices.”

Taylor describes creating her life as a brierpatch, noting that it not only keeps out others but makes it difficult to get out of one. She then accepts her life, quoting from a garden catalog.

“The blackberry, permitted its own way,

is an unmanageable plant.” Here’s a

variety called Taylor: “Season late,

bush vigorous, hardy … free from rust.”

That’s it. Don’t let my brierpatch rust.

Taylor was preceded in death by her husband and daughter, Katherine Baird Taylor.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Feb. 4 at St. Paul’s Memorial Church.