User:Baebbilisi/Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Edith Lovejoy Pierce (1904-1983) was a twentieth-century poet and pacifist.

Pierce was born in 1904 in Oxford, England. She married an American in 1929 and moved to the U.S. the same year. She and her husband lived in Evanston, Illinois.

Pierce was a poet and pacifist whose Christianity informed these two careers. In her writing she drew inspiration from the Bible, Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance, music, history, and religious mysticism, among other sources. Her poetry was featured in such progressive religious journals as The Christian Century, Religion in Life, and Fellowship, the publication of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. A prolific author, she published more than 350 poems as well as numerous articles and opinion pieces. She also published the English translation of With the Master, a Christian devotional work by French pacifist Phillipe Vernier, who had written it as Avec le Maître in French in 1934 during his imprisonment for refusal to fight in the French military. Pierce's own dedication to pacifism informed her interest in the translation, which was favorably reviewed by progressive American Christians. In 1944, Harper & Brothers published her work of poetry In This Our Day, which one reader deemed valuable supplementary material for teaching religion. Through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pierce came to know Martin Luther King, Jr., and to admire the civil rights movement. Their mutual interest in nonviolent direct action connected Pierce with King and other like-minded social justice activists. In 1964 British antiwar activist and author Vera Brittain called Pierce the poet of the American pacifist movement.