EFFIE WALLER SMITH

ABOUT EFFIE

 

 

Several of Smith's poems had been published in local papers by 1902 so that in 1904, her club of admirers and well-wishers celebrated her first volume of verse, Songs of the Months, released by a vanity press in New York City. The 110 poems in this collection touched a range of subjects, including nature, romantic love, patriotism, and not least of all, the months.

 

The same year that Songs of the Months came out, Effie Waller married a man named Lyss Cockrell who quit the marriage when it was very young, and whom Effie divorced soon after he made his exit. In 1908, she tried matrimony again with former classmate, Charles Smith. This marriage, which produced one child who died in infancy, was also brief, with Effie filing for divorce before the year was out.

 

During all the personal trials of her life, Effie Waller Smith kept at her writing, even getting three short stories published in Putnam's. In 1909, two more volumes of her verse appeared. The first was Rhymes from the Cumberland, which offers meditations and remembrances of the Kentucky-Virginia Cumberland Mountains area and musings on religion and romance. In the second volume, Rosemary and Pansies, "many of the poems are somber and subdued yet definite and conclusive as they examine issues and situations in life. There is a mood maintained throughout that sometimes delves into the mystical." These are the words of David Deskins, who has assiduously searched for information and provided insights into the life and mind of this rather unknown bard.

 

In 1917, when she was thirty-eight, Effie Waller Smith appeared in print for the last time: the publication was the prestigious magazine Harper's, and the work was a sonnet, "Autumn Winds." After this, the Effie Waller Smith the writer apparently disappeared, though the woman lived another forty years, the bulk of which she spent in Wisconsin where she relocated in the mid-1920s and where she raised Ruth, the daughter of a deceased friend whom she adopted in the late 1920s.