Marguerite Frances Cowley (née Baird; 1890 – September 23, 1970), known as Peggy Cowley and also as Peggy Baird and by her first married name Peggy Johns, was an American landscape painter. She was married to poet-playwright Orrick Johns and writer

Malcolm Cowley Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, ''Blue Juniata'' (1929), his lyrical memoir, ''Exile's Return ...

and was the lover of playwright

Eugene O'Neill Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier ...

and poet

Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, '' The Brid ...

Activism

Baird was a member of the women's suffrage movement. In 1917, she invited Dorothy Day to join the National Woman's Party. They were jailed for 60 days for their protests but were released after 16 days and pardoned by President

Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of ...

br>

Personal life

After divorcing her first husband, Johns, she married Malcolm Cowley in 1919. In 1931 she moved to Mexico to obtain a divorce. While there her long friendship with poet

turned into Crane's first and only documented heterosexual affair. As Crane wrote to a friend about his romance with Peggy Cowley, "Rather amazing things have happened to me since Xmas. Peggy Cowley ... is mainly responsible". This affair has since become a major point of interest for Crane scholars—particularly for those reading him with an eye toward his sexuality—as his engagement with heterosexual life is a determining theme in his last major poem, "

The Broken Tower "The Broken Tower" is the last poem meant to be published by poet Hart Crane in 1932. In keeping with the varieties and difficulties of Crane criticism, the poem has been interpreted widely—as death ode, life ode, process poem, visionary poem, ...

". Appearing at moments to be a highly symbolic affirmation of their relationship, as well as a denial of his homosexual past (the 'broken tower' can be read as a defeated phallus), the poem was written just months before Crane committed suicide by jumping off of a passenger ship in 1932, following a trip to Mexico. Though their relationship had begun to deteriorate by that time (Crane said he had "misunderstood and misinterpreted Peggy's character quite badly"), Cowley was with Crane on the boat, and she figures briefly, but poignantly, in the events leading up to his deat
Hart Crane and family papers
Almost thirty years later, she wrote about this period in an article for ''Venture'', "The Last Days of Hart Crane." After Crane's death, Cowley married twice more and converted to Catholicism at the age of 60. Cowley died of cancer at Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Farm in

Tivoli, New York Tivoli is a village in Dutchess County, New York, United States. The population is 1,012, according to the 2020 census. The village, which was incorporated in 1872 from parts of Upper Red Hook Landing and Madalin, is the northernmost settlement ...

, where Cowley had resided for ten years.Paul L. Mariani, ''Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane'' (W.W. Norton, 2000), page 427)

References

External links

Letter from Katherine Anne Porter to Peggy Cowley, October 01, 1931
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cowley, Peggy 1890 births 1970 deaths 20th-century American painters