Unearthing a “Nobody” Poet: Rediscovering Genevieve Taggard

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June 12, 2025
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image of Genevieve Taggard with a sunflower

Photograph of Genevieve Taggard with a sunflower inflorescence; New York Public Library Digital Collections

The Intersection of Poetry, Research, and Book Arts

Why are some poets remembered and glorified, while others fade into obscurity? And when you do stumble upon a “nobody” poet, why research them and make their work discoverable and interpretable for others? These two questions, and a desire “to recover another feminist and political poet who was subject to erasure” formed the basis of Ella Grim '25's Stamps Scholar research project. 

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Ella hits play. The sound of scratchy vinyl, then a quick, steady voice punctuates the air, reciting a (slightly edited) Emily Dickinson poem:

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d banish us – you know.”

The voice in the audio belongs to poet, scholar, and activist Genevieve Taggard, and hearing it was Ella’s first encounter with Taggard’s voice. But Ella felt she already knew Taggard. Up to that moment, Ella had spent months poring over Taggard’s archived letters, manuscripts, and other ephemera housed at Rauner Special Collections Library.

There is a deep intimacy in combing through someone else’s records, in holding their postcards to dear friends, their scribbled over manuscripts, the notice of their death by telegram.

Ella Grim '25

Taggard — prolific, published widely to acclaim during her life, and a poet who kept company with the likes of Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, and Ernest Hemingway —  faded from mainstream literary memory. Along with many other poets active between 1900 and 1950, Taggard was, Ella writes, “silenced by a conflation of factors, from economic influences on publishing and academia to misogyny and McCarthyism.” 

When anyone asked her about her research, Ella would tell them, “it’s about a largely forgotten poet.”

 

Rediscovering Taggard, Becoming a Researcher

Across the two years of her Stamps Scholar project, Ella diligently analyzed Genevieve Taggard’s materials held at Rauner Library with a goal of making Taggard’s life and work more discoverable and approachable. Using various library resources—from research librarians to microfilm reels to the Book Arts Workshop—Ella aimed to re-conceptualize Taggard's life and poetry for a modern audience.

For her project to be a success, Ella had to become a researcher. She writes that a core part of her work was learning how to search databases, engage with archives, and assess objects, including Taggard’s books, using a method called descriptive bibliography. 

card catalog file for Long View poem and taggard materials from the archives

Rauner Special Collections Library card catalog for Taggard's poem, "Long View" and excerpt of archive contents

One of the many library experts who helped Ella on her journey to becoming a researcher was Wendel Cox. He shares how Ella first reached out to him in her freshman year, “momentarily adrift” in Jessica Beckman’s History of the Book course. “She was trying to untangle the mysteries of miniature books and typographical errors in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry. Could I help? Of course.” What Wendel didn’t know then, but appreciates now, was that Ella would make a habit of getting “lost” and “gloriously so.”

Ella turned confusion into curiosity and research into adventure. Newspapers, books, magazines, Congressional hearings, archives—each became a new terrain to chart. She pursued questions that even the most accomplished undergraduates rarely think to ask, and followed them farther than most ever dare. 

Wendel Cox

With Wendel’s guidance and help from the Rauner Library team, Ella unearthed as much as she could about Genevieve Taggard. Among the physical items she examined, from literary magazines produced by UC Berkeley students in the 1910s to manuscript copies of poetry books and letterpress printed broadsides, Ella developed a picture of Taggard's life that answered questions about erasure and obscurity.

Ultimately, what Ella discovered in the archives of this “nobody” poet was a “legacy of visionary feminist, social poetics…a poetics that speaks directly of hard things in hard times, that dreams of the future while grounded in the struggle of the present, and that refuses to lose hope.”

 

Helping Build a Collective Memory

poem Imminent Doom by Genevieve Taggard

one of Ella's handmade letterpress broadsides featuring Genevieve Taggard's poem, "Imminent Doom"

Throughout her research and rediscovery of Genevieve Taggard, Ella was fulfilling another critical project outcome: to build a stronger collective memory around Taggard’s life and poetry. She used the knowledge gained from poetry classes and her time as a student worker in the Book Arts Workshop (BAW) to achieve this outcome. 

In her reimagining of Taggard’s poems, Ella asked herself, “how can my work reach out to folks who don’t want to engage directly with mountains of old documents?” She answered that by bringing “bits of the archive out of the archival space via artistic translations and community engagement.”

With the skills she developed while working at BAW alongside mentor Sarah Marcella Parella, Ella built toward that collective memory in various ways, including giving Taggard’s poems “new life” by printing some of her works on a letterpress. She distributed these postcards across Dartmouth and beyond, attempting to build a more participatory archive through tangible engagement with a long forgotten poet. She also documented her research journey in a Substack blog series; presented her research findings and work to Dartmouth students and faculty; and in May 2025, led a tour of Taggard's archives. 

Working in the Libraries opened my imagination further than I thought possible.

Ella Grim '25

Haptic Learning and the Research Process

Coupling the library’s research resources—from librarians like Wendel to the archives in Rauner Library—with hands on, experiential learning at BAW, Ella drew on the Libraries' multifaceted offerings to enrich her research practice.

“With the understanding of print production processes I gained from working at Book Arts and attending a typography and printing course at Rare Book School, I was able to analyze not only the content but the form of the objects I studied in the archive.” Often, this approach led to even deeper insight about Taggard. For example, Ella applied her Book Arts skills to conduct an analysis of the printing techniques used for an anthology Taggard edited. From that analysis, Ella could support a hypothesis about Taggard's broad influence based on physical evidence. “I could point to features of the physical book and say, ‘Hey, this paper and the style of this type means the book was more expensive to produce, so Taggard was likely read by upper-class citizens who could afford a highly decorated, fine press edition.’” 

Working with printing and design techniques that Genevieve Taggard would have dealt with brought Ella closer to Taggard’s work, and possibly, her thinking. This kind of haptic learning is what Book Arts Workshop, and Dartmouth Libraries, are all about.

Sarah Marcella Parella
Ella Grim '25

Ella Grim '25

Sarah adds that by simultaneously conducting research and working for Book Arts Workshop (assisting fellow students with projects and creating printed and bound material for outreach), Ella had a unique opportunity to grow and develop as a writer, artist, and researcher.

“Without the support of so many amazing library staff and without access to Book Arts Workshop, my project would have looked really different,” shared Ella. “I’m so glad to have had the chance to work with these people and resources during my time at Dartmouth.”

Today, Ella prepares to graduate. It was through this research project, and what she learned working alongside experts in the Libraries, that she became a researcher and an artisan. For Ella, the two are mutually inclusive, and she sees both as honorable pursuits she hopes will continue to inspire her future studies and career choices long after Dartmouth.

 

 

 

 

*This story contains some of Ella Grim's writing, edited and used here with permission.

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