The Mudward Prophet: Excavating the Worldview of Leonora Speyer
In the shadow of early 20th-century American letters rests the neglected figure of Leonora Speyer (1872–1956), a poet of wealthy lineage, trained under the eaves of music conservatories, whose verses defy standard cartographies of Modernism. Born in Washington, D.C., Speyer lived for years in Europe as Lady Speyer, wife to banker and violinist Sir Edgar Speyer, before the Great War and suspicion of German sympathies drove them to exile in the United States. Her first recognized forays into poetry began after her return to New York, near mid-life, at a time when most poets are either canonized or forgotten. It was with a kind of belated birth that she emerged, her style formed not in adolescence or in cafés among beatniks and radicals, but from the music of her first labors—violin playing—and the philosophical poise of exile.
Speyer’s poetry, collected in works such as *Fiddler’s Farewell* (1926) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning *Fiddler’s Farewell and Other Poems* (1927), reveals an exquisite sensibility, where sound deeply informs thought, and the concrete converges with the metaphysical. While not a poet of overt mysticism, Speyer occupies an intriguing borderline—between art and abstraction, sound and idea, entity and essence. Yet she has remained curiously underrepresented in poetry anthologies, relegated perhaps for her ornate diction or refusal to revolt with the rage the times demanded.
When asked what compelled her to write, Speyer once replied: “The strings of the violin were my first arteries; but words, reticent and shivering, came later, and with them a whole new pain I needed to tame.”^1 This statement signals a transformation from instrumentalist to wordsmith, but undergirds a larger metaphysical shift—one from pure sound into embodied meaning.
It is perhaps telling that her language often operates in what we might call a “Chladnian mode,” echoing the manner sound creates pattern—a visual logic of vibration: “The air is fixed with powdered light / Whose hush embalms a timbred sting” (*Fiddler’s Farewell*, p. 43). Such lines visualize silence as fixed light and its undoing as music—a synesthetic crossing that aligns with early 20th-century experiments in Symbolist poetry, but also, curiously, with ancient Platonic notions of harmony as the language of the soul.
A poignant sense of dislocation runs throughout her oeuvre, traceable not just to her emigration but to a deeper ideological suspension: an inability to tether one’s faith completely to the industrial modernity bustling around her. In “April on Park Avenue,” she writes:
> “And who is mourning this buttoned Spring,
> Trussed in linen, shorn of air?
> I followed the cry of a tulip-lunged bird
> And found it stifled in electric glare.” (*Fiddler’s Farewell*, p. 19)
Here, the urban spring is scaffolded in restraint. Even flora, which traditionally signals hope, is “buttoned” and “trussed,” and the bird—birdsong, authenticity, perhaps even the poet herself—is “tulip-lunged,” at once floral and gasping. This conflation of the natural and the mechanical reveals how Speyer anticipates later ecological and phenomenological inquiries long before they became fashionable. She perceives the city not merely as architecture but as a condition of alienation, one that mutates being itself.
To immerse oneself fully in Speyer’s poetry is to be submerged in silence that shudders just before phrase, much like Rilke’s angels carry the terror of too much beauty. Her poetic narrators do not seek transcendence in the usual spiritual way; they yearn for the possibility that the world might be redeemed through accord. In “Ivory Tower,” she writes, “Not above the clouds, but among them, / My thoughts congeal into sluggish gold.”^2 The metaphor of slowed thought echoing molasses or aged metal situates her metaphysics firmly within the decaying Real: not eschatological salvation, but weathered reconciliation with the greyish enormity of living.
Perhaps the most philosophical of her pieces is “Notation for a Forgotten Fugue,” a little-discussed work from *Heights and Depths* (1933), published near the tail of her career. Consider the fragment:
> “I wrote a sun into the margin,
> But no one saw—it played no key.
> The chorus bent; the strings went dumb—
> I bowed toward sand invisibly.” (p. 72)
A sun “written into the margin” evokes the Platonic Form of the Good hidden within the marginalia of existence—shining, yet unrecognized. The fugue, a form predicated on patterned contrapuntal response, is here lost—memory degraded into an invisible bowing to ephemeral sand. The poem ends not with crescendo but hush, an allegory for artistic labor that fails to harmonize with a public too harried or hollow to listen.
This brings us to a reflective turning: what could it mean to bow “toward sand invisibly”? It is an image of futility perhaps, but also one of transmuted dignity. The violinist, the poet, the philosopher—these figures all enact a motion that may or may not resonate. The sand is unmarked, unaffected by the bowing, yet perhaps the gesture itself acquires the quality of ritual: it becomes a phenomenological resistance to forgetting.
In the posthuman age, where the algorithm now surveys the soul, Leonora Speyer’s quiet resistance becomes oddly prophetic. In a culture wherein recorded repetition supplants live performance, her poetry—hewed from transient gestures—models an ethics of attentiveness. To recall her is not only to remember another poet but to align with a mode of living that values pattern and silence, the inchoate and the resonant.
Speyer’s Judaism, too, filtered through European refinement and softened by American environmentalism, often bursts subtextually through these gentle strophes. It is not a theism of certainty but a questioning marked by midrashic engagement. While she makes no explicit theological treatises, consider “Birch Sabbath”:
> “The leaves were scrolls I dared not read;
> The wind unshelved them anyhow.
> I stood at Sinai very still,
> But every breeze had changed the vow.” (*Heights and Depths*, p. 58)
It is difficult not to see in this a reimagining of revelation as impermanent, subject to alteration. The line “every breeze had changed the vow” invites a radical ontological humility: truth does not arrive once and forever but is rewritten through time’s passing. This vision resonates with thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas, who emphasized the ethical primacy of encounter over fixed doctrines^3.
To read Speyer today is to embrace this intimate instability—a tuning of the self to a cosmos that responds, refracts, but rarely repeats. She is not a poet for the impatient reader; her metaphors bend like reeds around a question palmed at the edge of the mind.
Thus we return to her own assertion about poetry arriving after pain and sound. Hers is a voice whose silence cracks open the margin, where one might yet draw an unseen sun.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, pattern, exile
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^1 Speyer, Leonora. *Interview in The Poetry Review*, 1925. Archives of the Poetry Society of America.
^2 Speyer, Leonora. “Ivory Tower,” in *Fiddler’s Farewell*, New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1927.
^3 Levinas, Emmanuel. *Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority*. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.