Helen Santmyer (1895–1986) would be mostly forgotten except for that fact that in 1982, in her eighties, a university press published her novel “. . . And Ladies of the Club.” Set in a small city in her home state of Ohio, the novel covers generations of women in a literary club — building through their lives a Tocquevillian picture of the small voluntary associations that once defined American public life. The novel was a surprise success, generating literary bidding-wars, selling two million copies in paperback, and sparking innumerable newspaper profiles of the elderly author. Santmyer wrote poetry as well, beginning in her her undergraduate days, and in December 1921 she published in the literary journal “The Bookman” today’s Poem of the Day, a sonnet called “The Prairie Town.” Anyone who has lived in the small towns of the Midwest will resonate with her sharp observation of the places where the “compass-needle streets lead up and down / And lose themselves in empty prairie seas.” Yet her conclusion is not rejection. The towns rest in “the unsoftened majesty” of the prairie, and “The long main street . . . / Lies like an old sea road, star-pointed north.”

The Prairie Town
by Helen Santmyer

Lovers of beauty laugh at this grey town,
     Where dust lies thick on ragged curb-side trees,
And compass-needle streets lead up and down
     And lose themselves in empty prairie seas.

Here is no winding scented lane, no hill
     Crowned with a steepled church, no garden wall
Of old grey stone where lilacs bloom, and fill
     The air with fragrance when the May rains fall.

But here is the unsoftened majesty
     Of the wide earth where all the wide streets end,
And from the dusty corner one may see
     The full moon rise, and flaming sun descend.

The long main street, whence farmers’ teams go forth,
Lies like an old sea road, star-pointed north.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.