William Carlos Williams: A Letter to Sonia Raiziss

Abstract

SONIA RAIZISS was born in Germany but raised in Philadelphia. She earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, where her father, a bio-chemist, was a member of the faculty. She died in 1994 at the age of 85. Raiziss is now best-remembered as the long-time editor of the literary magazine Chelsea and as the translator of poetry from the Italian, notably that of Alfredo de Palchi, the author of Scorpion’s Dark Dance, published in 1994. Her own poetry was published in Through a Glass Darkly, a volume issued in Paris in 1932 while she was a student at the Sorbonne, and in Buck County Blues, published in New York in 1977. In the intervening years her poems appeared in numerous small magazines, as well as the Saturday Review and the New York Times. At the end of the 1940s, in a survey of poets, she is reported as saying that she earned ‘only about $100 a year from her poetry’. She also published a critical study, The Metaphysical Passion: Seven Modern American Poets and the Seventeenth-Century Tradition, in 1952.1