The Poet of Quiet Things, Karle Wilson Baker

In the early and mid-20th century, Nacogdoches was the home of a notable poet, writer and woman of letters. Karle Wilson, daughter of William and Kate (Montgomery) Wilson, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in October 1878. Her parents moved to Nacogdoches by 1900, and after attending college and teaching, Karle moved to Nacogdoches in 1905.

In August 1907, she married local banker Thomas E. Baker, and the couple had two children.

Karle Wilson Baker first published in 1903 with a poem in Harper’s magazine. In the 1910s, she became the most frequently published poet in the Yale Review. Yale University Press published her first collections of poems, Blue Smoke and Burning Bush, and Old Coins, a book of fables. These publications established her national reputation.

In 1924, the Dallas News labeled Baker “The Poet of Quiet Things,” and Southern Methodist University awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters.

Karle showed versatility, writing poems, essays and novels. The State Textbook Commission adopted her children’s history reader, The Texas Flag Primer.

Her 1931 collection of poems, Dreamers on Horseback, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Two of her successful historical novels, Family Style (1937) and Star of the Wilderness (1942), were set in East Texas.

When the State Board of Regents dedicated Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College on April 30, 1924, Karle read two poems, Within the Alamo and The Pine Tree Hymn, and the latter became the college’s first school song. She began teaching at the college in 1924 and taught there 10 years. Stephen F. Austin State University houses the majority of her papers.

In 1958 Karle was designated an honorary vice president of the Poetry Society of Texas, of which she was a charter member. She had served in 1938–39 as president of the Texas Institute of Letters, of which she was a charter member and the first woman fellow. Still other recognition was given her by the Authors League of America, the Philosophical Society of Texas, and the Poetry Society of America.

Karle wrote in her diary that “writing my poems is seldom more laborious than skimming the cream from my thoughts. It just needs time and quiet to rise.”

Author Sarah Ragland Jackson wrote a biography on Karle called Texas Woman of Letters in 2005 describing her as a remarkable Texas poet whose important contributions to Texas literature were overshadowed by her male contemporaries. The book gives readers more of an insight into her challenge to make her way into the mainly male-dominated literary world of that time.

A statue honors Karle Wilson Baker on the west side of Mound Street in Nacogdoches where her former home was located. She died at the age of 82 on November 9, 1960, and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Nacogdoches.

Let Me Grow Lovely

Let me grow lovely, growing old —

So many fine things do:

Laces, and ivory, and gold,

And silks need not be new;

And there is healing in old trees,

Old streets a glamour hold;

Why may not I, as well as these,

Grow lovely, growing old?

I Shall Be Loved As Quiet Things

I shall be loved as quiet things

Are loved — white pigeons in the sun,

Curled yellow leaves that whisper down