Husband Alexander Buys Wife New Dress

When She Starts Looking Like A Poet

“I like to walk in cities and window shop,” declared Ethel Barnett de Vito, Norwood’s outstanding poet, who belies the popular notion that to be a good poet one must lead the life of an eccentric. In fact, her husband, Alexander de Vito, who is also a writer, declared that “Everytime she gets to look like a poet, I go out and buy her a new dress.”

Mrs. de Vito, one whose lyrics appear almost every other week in the Saturday Evening Post, is a person with a consuming interest in other people. She writes mostly about people, most of all people whom she has met just once or twice, and in whom she sees something that particularly intrigues her. Thus she can use her imagination in filling in the blanks. In other words, she supplies the clothing later One of her most recent studies is Brown, the Gardner, which is an impression of someone whom she has met in Norwood.

Mrs de Vito, who has lived at 58 Washington street since 1942 with her husband Alexander and her son Robert, now eleven, does all her own housework which does not particularly interest her At heart she is a traveler and would prefer a “suitcase” life. She expresses her distaste for possessions in her lyric

“Hold lightly all possessions great or small
Ease on the vigil stealing nightly rest —
A house or a trinket may outlast us all
And little else can ever be possessed ”

Although she has settled down now, Mrs. de Vito spent a great deal of her early life traveling. She was born in Boston but she moved with her family to Panama she was three months old. She attended school there until she graduated from High School, however, she made many visits to the States. Her two brothers, both of whom were musicians, were born in Panama, but now they both live in New England. Her older brother Louis Barnett, a former Major in the Army Intelligence Service just arrived from Denmark with his Danish wife Greta. They are living with the de Vitos until they find a house. Her younger brother Paul, is associated with station WKBR in Manchester, N H..

All three of the Barnetts retain a great love for “Calypso” the West Indian rhythm music with words that are a corruption of English In fact, they confess to having had much fun in High School reading the immortal bards in “CaIypso” dialect.

However, Mrs. de Vito did some serious work in school. While in the eighth grade she competed in a High School composition contest for any type of competition, and won first prize with a thousand-word poem. Once her father found out about her talent, unfortunately, he began to call on her for poems to celebrate all types of family occurrences. She. therefore, pretended she had outgrown the writing of poetry, but, in reality, she kept on writing without telling anyone anything about it. In fact, her husband, whom she met in a Boston University Journalism class, never really knew about her poetry writing until after they were married.

His first suspicions were aroused in 1934 right after they were married They were unpacking books and her husband came across some High School annuals with her poetry in it. including the prize poem. Until then, he had thought her writing interest was journalism She denied that she still wrote. Then, he caught her at it.

Several times he had noticed that she would get out of bed in the middle of the night and be missing for one or two hours. He followed her one night and found her curled up on a divan writing away, totally oblivious of the fact that he entered the room He then suggested that she send some poems to a magazine. This she refused to do. Alexander de Vito, however waited his time and, when his wife went away for a few weeks on a visit, he sent sixty or seventy of her poems to small magazines Though forty of them were immediately accepted, she refused to have anything to do with them.

It was not till they settled in Dedham in 1939 that she really agreed to consider her poetry seriously. She then started sending poems to the larger magazines- Her first poem to appear in a national magazine was her lyric “Death” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in June 1940. Since that time she has had poems printed in almost every major magazine that publishes poetry. She still does not reread her poems or memorize them.

Asked about her technique and her ideas about form in poetry, she replied that she had trained herself to think in terms of the short lyric. However, she advised that “one should not dwell on thought processes because it is like considering how you walk or considering how you eat ” She claims as masters Robert Browning E. A Robinson, and Robert Frost. Asked particularly about her admiration for Browning, she stated that it was his short dramatic stories like “Andrea Del Sarte” and “My Last Dutchess” which intrigued her.

One of the most interesting coincidences that have occurred in connection with poetry happened after she talked before the Norwood Woman’s Club. She would almost do gardening rather than have to speak in public. After her lecture one of the women in the audience spoke to her. The lady related her son, a soldier, who was going through a monastery in Southern France. had discovered that Ethel Barnett de Vito’s poem “Soldier to His Small Son” had been illuminated on the wall by the nuns

Mrs. de Vito said that many of her poems have appeared in English magazines and no doubt that is how the nuns saw the poem that they picked out. However she has never published a collection of her poetry, though many publishers have urged her to do so.

The truth of the matter is that Mrs. de Vito is so interested in other people that she finds little time to think about herself She is impatient when the mail arrives late. She reads newspapers avidly, but it is the human interest stories, the odd items, which really intrigue her. As for books, it almost goes without saying that she prefers biographies. It is the personal details and not the great speeches which she finds to her liking. She wants to know more about the men and not especially their achievements. She considers Dickson Wechter’s The Hero in America pretty nearly ideal reading “It shows you the । stuff of which heroes are really made—the other side of the man in the history book, the side that makes mistakes like you and me.” It is this interest in others, of course, which has won a large audience for Ethel Barnett de Vito’s poems. She knows what everyday existence is really about. She does not consider herself out of this world but rather in this world As her brother put it, “She is a poet with a sense of humor”.

(All articles originally appeared in the Norwood Messenger unless otherwise noted)