Craft: Dilys Laing

Dilys Laing (1906-1960) was an obscure American poet born in Pwllheli, North Wales. She produced four books of poetry, with the last published posthumously. These were Another England (1941), Birth Is Farewell (1944), Walk Through Two Landscapes (1949), and Poems from a Cage (1961). She also published a novel, The Great Year, in 1948. Though in her lifetime her poems appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Poetry, since her death, awareness of her and her poems has more or less disappeared.

Laing was born Dilys Bennett. Her father was a civil engineer and his work brought the family to distant places, such as north Scotland, Lagos, Ontario, and Vancouver. She made a living editing a page of the Vancouver Daily Sun designed for children, and she was then on the editorial staff of the Victoria Daily Colonist.

Laing in October 1935: “I from the belltower pour / bellsongs on the hour.”

She married Alexander Laing in 1936 and they moved west of Norwich, Vermont (the setting of some of her poems) on nine acres of wooded hills. She became a US citizen in December 1941.

Laing specialized in lyric poetry, but often wrote poems with adept meter and rhyme. The voice shows a perceptive, vulnerable sensitivity. She was not experimental, not confessional, and not tied to any school or trend. She was a feminist writing out of the turmoil of the 1940s and she writes from and toward a female God.