SYLVIA TRENT AUXIER

(December 28, 1900–December 4, 1967)

Sylvia Trent Auxier was the eldest of sixteen children born to Dollie Blaine May Trent and T.J. Trent. She grew up in Pike County, Kentucky, attending a one-room log school. She went on to Pikeville College Academy, where she graduated at the head of her class.

She was a teacher for two years before earning an R.N. degree at the University of Cincinnati Nursing School. She began her career as a public health nurse in eastern Kentucky, traveling by horseback to patients in Pike, Knott, Perry, and Leslie counties.

In 1928, she married Jean Auxier, a lawyer, and they lived in a rustic log and stone house in Meta, Kentucky. The couple had one son.

Her family has claimed that “the first sentence she spoke was in iambic pentameter and the second rhymed with it.” Long before her first book was published, her poems appeared in a number of publications, including the Saturday Evening Post, Christian Science Monitor, and Progressive Farmer. Auxier's first collection of poetry, published in 1948, was followed by five additional volumes, with the final one published posthumously by Pikeville College Press. She died near Pikeville in an automobile accident.

On the book jacket of With Thorn and Stone, Pulitzer Prize—winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks praised her work: “The poetry of Sylvia Auxier is sane as well as beautiful. In it are to be found balance, a tenderized exaltation, and a comprehensive clarity.”

Auxier paid attention to the women in her life and to everyday activities—and she paid tribute to them in her poetry.

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Poetry: With Thorn and Stone: New and Selected Poems (1968), Green of a Hundred Springs (1966), No Stranger to the Earth (1957), The Grace of the Bough (1957), Love-Vine (1953), Meadow-Rue (1948).

SECONDARY

Dorothy Edwards Townsend, Kentucky in American Letters, Vol. 3 (1976), 21–24. William S. Ward, A Literary History of Kentucky (1988), 344–45.