An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Corey Gibson (Visiting Research Fellow, 2025)
The Worm Queen Turns: Helen Adam (1909-1993) from Dundee Manse to California Coven
The poet Helen Adam (1909-1993) had two careers on two continents, the first as a child in Scotland, the second in middle age in America. A fey “child prodigy” and a daughter of the manse, Adam wrote fairy poetry for polite society and was celebrated by the great and the good. Thirty years later she would be ensconced in the San Francisco Renaissance, a “good witch” and “pagan maiden” to her poets in arms, whose violent and sexually explicit ballads thrilled and inspired, especially in live performance. Drawing from Adam’s personal archive this talk examines the relationship between Adam’s early and late careers as cultivated through her respective poetic personae: “The Elfin Pedlar” and “The Worm Queen”. It argues that, in understanding this dynamic, we unearth surprising connections between disparate literary genres, cultural movements, and modes of knowledge: from the Celtic Twilight to the Beat Generation. Adam’s bipartite career explodes literary historical periodisation and tangles its sequential logic. Hers are poetic personae always out of time, onto whom latent fears and desires are projected. These are shaped by her life stage and public image, and by the historical forces respectively at work in the literary cultures of interwar Britain and post-war USA.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7