Recollecting Amelia Earhart's Lost Verse

Traci Brimhall introduces readers of Literary Hub to Amelia Earhart's identity as both an aviator and a poet. "The union of famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart to her business manager and author-adventurer George Palmer Putnam in 1931 had many carefully constructed privacies," Brimhall explains. "Putnam preserved some of those confidences after her disappearance, most notably drafts of her poems." More: 

Although Earhart wrote three books about her flights, was the aviation editor for Cosmopolitan, and wrote numerous other pieces of journalism about everything from her experiences flying an autogiro to her musings on clouds, her love of poetry only shows up on rare occasions in her prose.

Despite poetry’s absence in much of her published writing, Putnam said in his memoir, Soaring Wings, that “AE wrote many fragments of verse, for she found a deep pleasure in building little images with words. That aspect was very private—almost secret.” While acknowledging that private pleasure, Putnam also published two fragments of poems from among her papers in his memoir, but the other splintered lines weren’t discovered until his granddaughter donated Putnam and Earhart’s papers to Purdue University in 2002.

Among the secrets he helped keep were her lyric fragments on death and desire, and her rejected submission to Poetry magazine. Exploring the archives, the only final drafts of any poems I found among the old scrapbooks and scribbled notes on envelopes were those in that rejected submission. Somehow it enamored me even more—this famous and unknowable aviatrix and writer left only these unfinished drafts as clues I could puzzle over, watching her mind revise, redact, question, leaving no answer to the mystery of where her final poems may be. 

Searching the archives for Amelia Earhart’s lost poems is a study in fragments—every tucked-away line on the back of a receipt hidden in a notebook an invitation to speculate on her thoughts. Even when her widower published pieces of her verse in his memoir, he had an independent source verify the authenticity of one of them, unsure if the private voice on the page was indeed hers.

Read on at Literary Hub.