Smith, Marine

Maurine Smith was a member of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago during the two years preceding her death on March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three. Her association with the Poetry Club came at a most fortunate time, for among its members were Glenway Westcott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Maurice Lesemann, and Yvor Winters. After her death in 1921 Westcott and Winters wrote the foreword to a volume of Smith's poems, "The Keen Edge." Yvor Winters says of Smith, "For me she is fixed in a few lines, aided, perhaps, by fragments of an inaccurate memory. Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn, she surveys the autumn morning through a window."