Jeremy Ingalls papers
Tiled image with portraits of American poet Jeremy Ingalls and her lifelong friend and editor Mary Dearing Lewis, 1957, 1958, undated; Box 35-37.
Collection area: Literature
Collection dates: 1822-2004 bulk (bulk 1930-1990)
The Jeremy Ingalls papers contains the personal and professional archive of Professor, Dr. Jeremy Ingalls, and contains her correspondence, project and clippings files, poetry, academic writing, translation notes, coursework and teaching materials, reviews and collection of writings by other authors, a collection of research materials on Stephen Vincent Benét, extensive collection of notebooks, photographs and photo albums, publications, and audio visual material. The collection also contains correspondence and materials created or collected by Ingalls’ partner and editor Mary Dearing-Lewis.
Of special note in the collection is the extensive correspondence between Ingalls and Dearing-Lewis, who lived apart for long stretches, for example the year 1958 when Ingalls taught English Literature at Kobe College, Japan, and after Ingalls left Rockford College to live in Tucson, AZ. These letters are intimate and lengthy and contain a wealth of information about the two women. Ingalls uses the following nicknames for Dearing-Lewis in her correspondence: Aram, Deering, Memsahib.
There are over 240 notebooks with a wealth of information. Ingalls made many notes about her research and pasted in many images and newspaper clippings. Most notebooks contain an index to content with subjects or particular points of interested taped to the front cover. Notebook types include General Notebooks, Seacross and Patmos (content related to war, politics, and anthropology), Mao, Chinese and Asian History, Translation notebooks, and notebooks identified by title of work or specific sub-topic.
The largest scholarly body of work is that related to her book Dragon in Ambush: the art of war in the poems of Mao Zedong. This book was compiled by Allen Wittenborn and published posthumously in 2013. Extensive information about the project can be found in Series 4 Subseries 4, but also in Series 8: Notebooks, Box 27, 28 and 29.
Throughout the collection the materials are laden with artistic flourish and non-traditional materials. Ingalls frequently created homemade books by fastening papers together with scavenged materials. Whole drafts of academic works appear on the back of junk-mail. There is a collection of works housed in recycled panty-hose boxes.
Jeremy Ingalls (1911-2000) was a well-known American poet, scholar, editor and translator. She won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1941 for The Metaphysical Sword and published 17 books during a literary career that spanned five decades. In addition to being a professor of English, she was a professor of English, she was a professor of Asian Studies at Rockford College in Illinois before retiring to Tucson in 1960. Ingalls’ editor, lifelong friend and partner, Dr. Mary Dearing Lewis, taught English at a number of colleges and universities in the Midwest before coming to Tucson with Ingalls. During their forty years here Ingalls was one of the first readers in the Poetry Center’s Visiting Poets and Writers Reading Series in 1964. Her last book of poems, This Stubborn Quantum was published by Capstone Editions (Tucson) in 1983, though she continued writing poetry through the 1990s. Dearing Lewis supported Ingalls’ work as a writer and scholar until the end of her life and died within a few months of her passing. In 2001 the estates of Jeremy Ingalls and Mary Dearing Lewis left nearly $1 million to the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Contributor of poems to anthologies and more than one hundred magazines and literary reviews. Contributor to professional journals.
Selected bibliography:
A Book of Legends (short stories), Harcourt, 1941.The Metaphysical Sword (poetry), Yale University Press, 1941, reprinted, AMS Press, 1970.Tahl (narrative poem), Knopf, 1945.The Galilean Way (prose), Longmans, Green, 1953.- (Editor and translator with S. Y. Teng) Li chien-nung,
A Political History of China , Van Nostrand, 1956. The Woman from the Island (poetry), Regnery, 1958.These Islands Also (poetry), Tuttle, 1959.- (Translator) Yao Hsin-nung,
The Malice of Empire , University of California Press, 1970. - (Translator and author of commentary) Yoichi Nakagawa,
Nakagawa’s Tenno Yugao , Twayne, 1975. This Stubborn Quantum: Sixty Poems , Capstone Editions, 1985.A Summer Liturgy: A Verse Play , Capstone Editions, 1985The Epic Tradition and Related Essays , Capstone Editions, 1988Dragon in Ambush: The Art of War in the Poems of Mao Zedong , compiled by Allen Wittenborn, Lexington Books, 2013.
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