MUNA Lee's name no longer rings a bell with readers of American poetry. Her once-celebrated work as a lyric poet who embraced both North and South America has been forgotten for decades, and remains ignored by scholars for reasons largely due to the fragmented humanities of today's universities. Her work as a translator and essayist in the Pan-American literary tradition, and her activism in the early decades of the Pan-American feminist movement, both figure prominently in their respective histories. Moreover, as a distinguished leader of the cause to further cultural relations between the Americas, Lee can be credited with important advances in the Pan-American movement, which embodied her lifelong vision of our achieving what she called Pan-American character, a multicultural American ethos composed of "aboriginal copper, carbon of Ethiopia, Latin dream, and stark Anglo-Saxon reality." Indeed, the lasting contributions made by Muna Lee to both American literature and society remain as impressive as this extraordinary woman was herself: a petite (5' 3"), dark-haired, dark-eyed lady from Mississippi, with striking intelligence and charm — and a graceful Southern voice which, toward the end of her life, the Library of Congress recorded for posterity in a reading of her poetry.

From Mississippi to Oklahoma

Lee was born on January 29, 1895, in small-town Raymond, Mississippi, to Benjamin Floyd Lee, a self-taught druggist who was the son of a wealthy plantation owner, and Mary Maud (McWilliams) Lee, the daughter of a physician in nearby Blue Mountain. They named her Muna not after anyone in particular, but because they liked the uniqueness and the sound of it, and because it derived from the poetic Latin word, munus, meaning gift. The descendants of early British settlers, her parents were both college graduates, and from the start they nurtured their daughter's intellectual curiosity and, later, her idealistic spirit. Muna was the eldest of nine children (five girls and four boys), three of whom died in infancy. The family enjoyed a modest yet genteel life in the quiet town of Raymond, about which she later said, "That old dream-like memory of Raymond has always stayed with me, [and] remained a reality when so often tangible things have seemed unreal."

During the years of her early childhood, Lee showed a remarkable taste for and interest in poetry, drama, and all types of literature rarely relished by children. This passion of hers was encouraged especially by her mother, who had published poems occasionally in her own youth. Not surprisingly, from the time Muna could write, she composed verses.

In 1902, enticed by business opportunity, her father boldly moved the family to what became Hugo, Oklahoma, then part of Indian Territory (now the county seat of Choctaw County, in the southeastern corner of the state), with its vast, open expanses of land. Oklahoma was then the home of more Native Americans than any other state in the country. The state's name was derived from two Choctaw words, okla, meaning "people," and humma, meaning "red": the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee and Creek; Cheyenne and Arapaho; Kiowa (Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita, Waco, Tawkoni, Caddo, Kichai and Delaware); Pawnee (Pawnee, Ponca, Nez Perce, Ottawa, Confederated Peoria, Quapaw, Seneca, Eastern Shawnee and Wyandot); and Sac- and Fox-Shawnee. Living in Hugo, she would see Choctaws in town every day.

The year the Lees arrived was the year the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway built an east-west line from Hope, Arkansas, to Ardmore, Oklahoma, creating the territorial town — "a straggling town of tents" — later named Hugo (after the French novelist, whom a local surveyor's wife admired). Almost overnight with the completion of these two strategic rail lines, Conestoga wagons converged on the new territory. The town's rail depot was the center of attention with trains coming and going all day long. The Harvey House Restaurant in the depot grew in popularity. There were dance-hall girls, hustlers, and gunfighters. And the "Harvey Girls" — the women who worked as waitresses in the Harvey House — who greeted each train that arrived.

There in Hugo with its frontier atmosphere, surrounded by wilderness, Lee spent the next seven years of her life, growing into her adolescence. Coming from the circumscribed genteel Southern Raymond to Hugo's Wild West, she was immersed for the first time in a very different ethos — one in which gentility did not work; only strength and daring would make it. "In that incredibly ugly and incredibly beautiful Indian Territory," she later recalled, "murder and sudden death were of frequent occurrence — seemed in the natural order of things. The streets were unpaved and the mud […] a thing to be dismissed from one's mind as a grotesque exaggeration."

In contrast were the prairie flowers — great billowing masses of color and fragrance — that enchanted her (and that later would help give a distinctive character to her poetry: meadow-sweet, spiderwort, johnny-jump-up, foxglove, lavender, and columbine, among others). There was the never-ending fascination in her father's drugstore, where long rows of blue glass jars were filled with strange substances — such as "linden leaves in dried bunches with tiny flowers still clinging to the stem" — labeled in abbreviated Latin which suggested to her the world beyond the prairie. And it was there in her father's store that Lee would take fiction from the rack of books and magazines, go curl up inside an empty packing-case, and read for hours — "anything," she said, "literally thousands of books": George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Charlotte M. Braeme, G. A. Henty, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, and numerous other popular authors.

Not only was Lee's childhood filled with literature, but with politics as well. Her father, who was an ardent Democrat and served as a member of the 1907 Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, often held political gatherings in a room above the store. Politics was a much-discussed subject in her family, and what she absorbed also contributed to the development of her intellect, preparing her for her future political life. Her experience in Oklahoma no doubt helped take her beyond the bounds of conventional Southern femininity, and opened her eyes to new possibilities of womanhood. It nurtured her independent spirit, as surely did word of the time's reawakened suffrage movement.

In 1909, at the age of fourteen, Lee returned to Mississippi for a year to attend Blue Mountain College, her mother's alma mater, a small privately-owned liberal arts college for women. Already unconventional and indifferent to schoolgirl activities, she spent much of her time with her English teacher, David Guyton, reading Browning and discussing Plato on the porch of her maternal grandfather, known as Dr. Mac Williams (who knew Faulkner's family). Guyton, himself a poet and blind as Homer, encouraged Lee to write, and soon she was bringing him large numbers of poems she had secretly written, amid her studies of English literature, Latin, French, physics, chemistry, and botany.

Guyton later recounted that "most of her college-day verses were amateur in type, but there were hints and flashes of genius even in those early attempts at writing." He also noted that "Robert Browning was her breath of life even in her early teens; she read him then with the skill and sympathetic understanding of a master."

Browning, who believed that the incarnation of divine love was necessary to guide human love, and that art was rooted in the ethical nature of human beings, gave her a model of religious and artistic convictions. He brought Christian beliefs to the test of experience, discarding orthodox dogma such as original sin, and gave her the idea that men and women cannot be judged merely by their acts, but by their quality of character fashioned in the act of living. In stressing the importance of intellect in moral affairs, he defined for her the approach to life that she would follow. Furthermore, his earliest published verse exhibited the poet's most private feelings, as her own lyrics would do as well.

In June 1910, Lee returned to Oklahoma to live at home in Hugo and then help her family move to Oklahoma City, the capital of the new "Sooner" state. Originally settled in a single day in the Great Land Run of '89, Oklahoma City had become a thriving commercial center with new oil-money flowing like adrenalin and stimulating its development. It offered her family a relatively richer life compared with their frontier life in Hugo. Just eighteen miles south of the city was the young University of Oklahoma, in Norman, where Lee enrolled in the fall of 1911.

After a full year including summer school there, during which she fell in love for the first time, she returned again to Mississippi, and entered the University of Mississippi from which she graduated with a BS in June 1913, at the age of eighteen. Little is recorded about her year at Ole Miss, where she took classes in English literature, Italian, history, mathematics, psychology, and geology. The school's yearbook has only a couple of sentences beneath her name which identify her as "fraught with learning […] a person with brains. We are glad that she came to us in time for Ole Miss to claim her as one of her daughters."

Starting Out as a Poet

While in Lawton, Lee made her first significant public appearance as a poet in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, in the January issue of 1916, with a sequence of nine poems titled "Footnotes." The opening poem, "Magdalen," establishes the tone of the sequence:

The poems focus on her personal experience with love lost. Composed in the aftermath of her first great love involving a young poet named John ("Jack") McClure, whom she had met at the University of Oklahoma, they express her pain and sorrow, anger and regret. Like most of her poetry, they are short subjective poems in the lyric tradition — poems with a song-like outburst of her innermost thoughts and feelings:

The sequence of "Footnotes" ends on an ambivalent note of recovery, which shows the conflict of inner forces that persisted in her for years:

This initial publication of Lee's in Poetry was soon followed by others in this influential magazine from Chicago. During this period, she would spend a summer there to work in its office, and strengthen her relationship with it (subsequently, the salutation of her correspondence with Poetry's founding editor, Harriet Monroe, was "Dear Aunt Harriet," since Monroe, not a blood relative, had become her patroness and thus "poetry aunt"). The time in which Lee was starting to gain recognition for her verse happened to be a good one. Indeed, the founding of Poetry in 1912 had heralded a great revival of interest in poetry throughout America, and poets and poetry abounded everywhere.

Nineteen sixteen was Lee's debut year as a poet, for that year she entered the world of publishing with multiple publications in a variety of literary magazines. Also in January, she published in Smart Set the first of several lyrics, most written about her great love of the time, to appear in this self-proclaimed "Magazine for the Civilized Minority." It was one of her so-called love songs, "The Unforgotten":

In the February issue she published another short lyric, "Bereavement," and in the April issue she published "Arcady," which to her joy was featured on that issue's opening page:

Alluding to her early days in Oklahoma City, where she had found by the streams and in the hills outside of town a bucolic world suited to her romantic passions, she translated the classical Greek Arcadia into the landscape of the American Southwest. By using images of the nature around her, instead of importing them from abroad, she had found a way to be original with an American voice, and thus enhance the appeal of her poetry.

Published in New York, Smart Set at this time was featuring the brilliant criticism of H. L. Mencken (who in 1914 had joined George Jean Nathan as the magazine's co-editor); his bold ideas were helping to clear the way for the tremendous flowering of new writing in America, to which Lee would contribute in the decades to come. And the magazine was gathering laurels for its poetry. For the young schoolteacher, the excitement of her initial publications in Poetry and Smart Set, which both had wide circulations here and abroad, was nothing less than inspirational, and helped motivate her to keep writing verse for her new-found audience. Moreover, through her correspondence with Mencken, she had found in him a long-time mentor and stimulating force. His generous praise of what she had already produced — and what she would later call his "contagious belief" in her ability to keep producing good work — spurred her continued poetic development.

Later in the spring of 1916, Lee published a sequence of seven short lyrics in the combined May-June issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse from Grantwood, New Jersey, just outside New York; this new magazine, launched in 1915, was edited by Alfred Kreymborg (his friend and fellow imagist, William Carlos Williams, would be guest editor of the magazine's next issue). Lee's verses in this publication had no titles and were simply numbered. Again, they focus on her experience with love and its loss, as in epigrammatic number III:

And number VI, which presents an image of her loneliness in the separation she endured:

Others had been created, in Kreymborg's words, "to print the work of men and women who were trying themselves in the new forms." He thus welcomed Lee's experiment with free verse. She later polished four of the seven lyrics, and presented them under the title "Imprisoned."

In July 1916, she published "A Villanelle of Forgetfulness" in Contemporary Verse from Philadelphia, another new poetry magazine, which first appeared in January. With the flourish of her publications that year, which paralleled the appearance of new journals devoted to poetry, Lee was establishing her identity as a poet, while still struggling with the daily realities of her life in the Southwest.

When an even better teaching job was offered her for the next school year — to teach at a young junior college called University Preparatory School (now Northern Oklahoma College), in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, in the north-central part of the state — Lee gathered her books and moved herself once more. Another small town on the plains but not far from the capital city, Tonkawa had sprung up after the historic land run of the late nineteenth century. The school had been created by an act of the legislative assembly of the Oklahoma Territory. Again, Lee would be teaching English literature as well as composition and rhetoric, but the young men and women in her classes would be relatively more sophisticated than the children she previously had taught.

In August 1916 in Smart Set, Lee published a brief statement in prose titled "Like a Tale of Old Romance," which served as an explanatory note seemingly taken from her correspondence with the editors:

This statement in itself, along with the series of poems Lee published in Smart Set starting in 1916, perfectly reflects the magazine's editorial policy: "Our stories need not strive to point a bourgeois moral [… and] there must not necessarily be a happy ending, for the great moving stories of life often end in disaster."

Although the story of Lee's first love had ended in disaster for her, the growing success that she was enjoying as a poet became a certain salvation. In the fall of 1916, while teaching in Tonkawa, she won Poetry magazine's first Lyric Prize. The monetary prize was $100, and equalled a month's pay for her at University Prep. But more important to her than that, she now was not only a published poet, but a prize-winning poet.

The poetry that she was writing in the Southwest shows the influence of the prevailing mode of love lyrics, as well as her relationship with McClure. His manner of heartfire was much inspired by the lyric style of the Elizabethan poet, Thomas Campion, whose airs McClure always had in his pocket during the days of their romance. The verses of the two Oklahomans were often part of a dialogue between them. Her poems written then were simple lyrics done mostly in rhymed quatrains, with occasional experiments with free verse; and the point of view was decidedly feminine. Nonetheless, when she would depart from the fragile voice and the predictable sentiment — a feminist departure that would grow in force in her mature work — her poetry would demonstrate that strength and daring that life in the Southwest demanded of her.

In "Compensation," published in Poetry in August 1917, Lee again focuses on her heart's misfortune, but with a strong-willed song to her metaphorically "dead" lover, which opens:

A few years later she would revise this lyric, toughening it with a new opening (and closing) line, "I am so glad that you are dead," which she then used as the poem's new title. She also deleted the original third quatrain:

These early lines, subsequently abandoned, reveal the lingering grief that still burdened her in Oklahoma. Life was testing her, toughening her, and compelling her to draw on her inner strength.

Adding to her personal dilemma, Lee's promising teaching career was cut short when the Oklahoma governor temporarily closed down the junior college. Unable to secure another teaching job on short notice, the question of what to do next confronted her like a dust cloud. She then fell back on her family, returning to her parents' home, and she started to work in the retail cooperative grocery for farmers — the Southwestern Commercial Company — which her ever-enterprising father had organized and managed; he had been forced to abandon his pharmacy business for lack of the formal education required for a state license. This job gave Muna room and board, but no income. She took charge of the store, acting as cashier, handling correspondence, and ordering from wholesalers. After work, exhausted by the day's business, she might spend a little precious time with poetry.

The year was 1917. At twenty-two, there she was with her intellectual brilliance and literary aspirations in Oklahoma City, amid the sultry plains, working in a lonely grocery store and living at home with her parents and young siblings. All the while, as always, she was devouring literature, including the work of contemporary poets. It would take her to a better place. Reading the monthly issues of Poetry, Smart Set, and Others to which she subscribed, she heard the worldly voices of Modernism calling to her.

Isolated and stifled, Lee needed to change her life. She wanted so much more for herself — for her intellect and her ambitions. When the opportunity to work with her linguistic skills presented itself to her in the spring of 1918, she pursued it with all her vigor. She applied for a federal job to serve as a translator, and she landed a position as "confidential translator" for the U.S. Secret Service, specifically, the Postal Censorship Division. With Germany's aggressive use of espionage during the First World War that now was in its fourth bloody year, the U.S. government felt compelled to impose itself on the free flow of international mail.

Lee's work would involve translating and censoring mail written in Spanish, Portuguese and French. She had qualified for this civil-service job, she said, by teaching herself Spanish in two weeks. Her solid foundation in the Romance languages, together with her burning desire to improve her situation, made this possible.

Lee had originally expected an assignment in border service. To her surprise, though, she was assigned to work in New York City, where a new life awaited her. The prospect of living in New York appealed to her very much. She was drawn from the plains and isolation of Oklahoma to New York's cosmopolitan and intellectual excitement, like a hungry flower to the sun. It was there that she would soon find the community she needed to flourish as a writer and woman of ideas.

In the World of New York

These publications would change her life dramatically, for they brought her work to the attention of Luis Muñoz Marín, a poet and journalist at the time (and future governor of Puerto Rico) — the son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the most prominent Puerto Rican statesman of his time, a leader of the movement for political autonomy from Spain, a journalist and poet and founder of the opposition newspaper, La democracia. In February of the following year, the dashing young Muñoz (three years her junior) presented himself to Lee, carrying with him a letter of introduction and a sheaf of her poems which he had translated into Spanish with the hope of publishing them in his new — but short-lived — bilingual magazine "devoted to Pan-American culture," called Revista de Indias (Indies Review). [See "Points of Fire," a short work of fiction based on the true story of their romance.]

Two exceptionally bright and passionate intellectuals, both restless and ambitious to make their marks, they fell wildly in love with each other, almost at first sight. They would take long walks together in Central Park, talking about the rich literature of Latin America, among other things. Each step they took led swiftly to the next for them, and she started writing verses to express her new-found joy, as in "A Song of Dreams Come True":

After knowing each other for only a few months, Lee and Muñoz were married on July 1, 1919 (six days after her government job ended); her married name was Muna Lee de Muñoz Marín, though she would continue to publish her work under her own. Now, living together in Greenwich Village, they vigorously pursued their individual writing and publishing ventures, and soon became a well-known — "most interesting" — couple in the literary world of New York.

A luminary in this world, Sara Teasdale, the celebrated lyric poet, and a friend of Lee's, had just said to Harriet Monroe in a letter written in May: "I'm awfully glad that Muna Lee has found happiness — at least let's hope it will be happiness. She talked a lot about wanting to find 'a rock' and I told her men are never rocks. […] And if she has a Latin-American, heaven keep her." But, at the time, Lee had never been happier.

The newlywed poets went to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia for a belated honeymoon; Lee's writing commitments had delayed it. Having hardly any money, they hitchhiked (and sometimes walked) from New York. In Philadelphia, when they ran out of funds, Lee called Poetry magazine which had not yet paid her for some of her work. They were stranded. Sitting in a park in the rain, they waited for the telegram with the money to come. It finally arrived after a few wet hours, and enabled them to make their way back to New York — back to reality.

Later that year, Lee and Muñoz were forced by their limited finances to move to a less costly house on Staten Island. Big changes were at hand: by the third month of their marriage, Lee was pregnant with the first of their two children. In the spring of 1920, Muñoz was pulled back to Puerto Rico, his true destiny, and brought her with him; he wanted to devote himself to bettering the lot of the island's poverty-stricken masses. She knew his Socialist attitudes quite well, and translated into English some of his political poems, such as his "Pamphlet":

Their daughter, Muna (Munita), was born in Puerto Rico in May. Now busy as a housewife and mother, Lee still pursued her professional interests, and in September she took a job at a high school in San Juan, teaching English. She also continued writing and publishing her poetry.

One poem composed during this year in Puerto Rico, titled "The Flame-Trees," depicts the "sea-change" occurring in her life that moved her beyond the haunting grief of her previous love affair, and that re-focused her passions. A recurring image in her poetry, the Caribbean flame tree — an umbrella-shaped tree — blooms in the summer months and dazzles the landscape with its flaming red blossoms:

Six months after the birth of her daughter, she was pregnant with her second child, Luis (Luisito, who was blond-haired). Muñoz moved his small but growing household, which now included his mother, back to the New York area during the summer of 1921, so that he could regroup from his frustrating year of political activity with the Socialist Party. Thanks to the money from a building his mother mortgaged in Puerto Rico, the Muñoz's were able to make a down-payment on a house in Teaneck, New Jersey, just outside New York. This would be Lee's home for the next four years. Muñoz found a job writing book reviews, and Lee likewise earned money by writing.

With the birth of their son in August, Lee's duties as mother and housewife again claimed her time. Describing her work during these years, she recounted:

Lee's experience living in Puerto Rico had opened her further to the vast cultural landscape of Latin America. She started calling Puerto Rico her "rich port" (the literal translation of the island's name), and it eventually became the place she would call home. She said she loved its "remoteness and completeness and intensity of life." It was during this period that she developed her passion for, and expertise in, contemporary Latin American poetry.

Publishing Her Sea-Change

The criticism in the Times suggests that her poems are imitative and that is sometimes true. Unlike the popular Love Songs (Macmillan, 1917) by Teasdale, however, Lee's poetry uses imagery of the Pan-American landscape with its unique geological and botanical features, which gives her work a distinctive character. Her verse shows the quality of enlightened regional consciousness that Mencken would soon celebrate as the "Oklahoma manner" of poetry. She expands it. She draws on her knowledge and awareness of natural history to depict the different scenes in her romantic drama, and thus locates her lyrics in American nature. Lee also has a habit of seeing the less usual image or seeing it in a slightly different way, which imparts a freshness to her poems. Beyond that, her lyrics have a sophisticated music of their own and, as the Boston Evening Transcript noted, "there is always something sharply individual in her vision."

The closing poem of Sea-Change reveals her quest for continued development both as a woman and poet. Originally one of the lyrics in her "Footnotes," it is the same poem she had published in the Pan-American Magazine, under the title "I Who Had Sought God"; but with a new title, "The Seeker," which emphasizes a more mature understanding that her salvation was something not to be expected from above, but found only through her own experience and free will.

Mencken's encouragement of Lee was essential to her poetic success. Soon after the publication of Sea-Change, she sent him one of the first six copies she had received from Macmillan. With her characteristic self-deprecating humor, she signed it: "For H. L. Mencken, to whose persistent encouragement of young writers is due the publication of a great many unnecessary books; this one among them" (May 13, 1923). In her letter to him, she elaborated: "A good deal of the responsibility for the book lies at your door undeniably. You are, I think, the only person who has ever considered my verse seriously. Even those whose lives have touched mine most nearly have thought last, if at all, of my poetry. As it happens, I am absurdly responsive to appreciation — hence your responsibility. I can only add my hope that you will find it worthwhile. For though I do not think it would have changed the aspect of the world for anyone else if I had not written, I know that it would have changed it for me. And I have always felt grateful to you."

With the publication of Sea-Change and the subsequent flourish of her poetry appearing in a wide range of magazines — American Mercury (Mencken's new monthly; see "Mushroom Town"), New Yorker, Current Opinion, Saturday Review of Literature, Literary Digest, New Republic, Commonweal, and Poetry, among others — Lee would establish herself not only as an important poet on the scene of the new American writing, but as a major voice in Mississippi and Oklahoma verse. Her uncollected poems, which would also appear in various anthologies, show her greater maturity as a writer.

Sea-Change remains the only book of her own poetry that she ever published. She was content with contributing poems to the periodical literature, for it allowed her to reach a wide audience. And since the early 1920s, her poetic endeavors had begun to expand with her new commitment to serving others as a translator of Latin American poets. Nonetheless, some twenty years after the publication of Sea-Change, she would lament that the book was out of print "since it is my poetry that means most to me." Indeed, she always thought of poetry "as daily fare […] as being as much the daily bread as the white hyacinths of life."

The publication of her book in the spring of 1923 was a joyous occasion for Lee, but her marriage had then taken a distressing turn when Muñoz left her and their children (as well as his mother) in Teaneck, so that he could return to Puerto Rico to compile his father's unpublished works, and participate more actively in the island's politics. She chose not to follow him into an unstable life again. Her sense of responsibility as a mother of two young children kept her at home in Teaneck, and close to New York and the publishers there on which she depended for income. He lived in Puerto Rico without his family for almost two years, before returning to them after his disenchantment with the outcome of the November 1924 general elections there.

In March of that year, while visiting her family in Oklahoma City, Lee gave as a gift to an old friend a copy of her Sea-Change, in which she inscribed: "The days that make us happy / make us wise." Her life had certainly changed dramatically — for better or worse — since her Oklahoma days, and she lived in a completely different world, the one she needed in order to thrive as a writer. Now, moreover, she had embraced two causes that would become central to her career, namely, feminism and Pan-Americanism.

For Lee, these two causes were intimately connected. Her marriage brought them together. Her later choice of Puerto Rico as her home would nurture them. Throughout the twenties, by which time recent U.S. intervention in Latin America and strong nationalist movements there had lessened the attraction of Pan-Americanism, she remained true to the cause. Her Pan-Americanism, at heart, was always romantic and idealistic. Initially, it had much to do with her campaigns for women’s rights, as well as her dream of political harmony between the Americas, where Latin American critics had come to view the United States as the imperialist "Colossus of the North."

She would dedicate the rest of her life to creating various forms of inter-American cultural relations, especially literary ones ranging from poems to programs, intended to help build bridges between the different nations for mutual acquaintance, understanding, and respect — what she considered basic ingredients for a better world.

In the Pan-American Literary Tradition

In 1925, as a translator and advocate of Latin American poetry, Lee made her first major contribution to the Pan-American literary tradition which dated back a century to the pioneering work of William Cullen Bryant, the premier translator of Latin American poetry in his day. Her achievement was an expression of everything she was and had become by 1925, the year that Poetry published a special issue in June, called its "Spanish-American Number," of which she was guest editor. This landmark publication, the first of its kind in the history of twentieth-century literary magazines, presented poems by thirty-one contemporary authors (all but three living) whose work Lee had selected and translated into English.

Lee's earliest translations from Spanish had appeared in 1920 in Thomas Walsh's Hispanic Anthology, a collection of verse translations made by "some of the greatest poets of England and America," in which Bryant's work is amply represented (including his famous rendering of José María Heredia's "Ode to Niagara"). Lee's contribution consisted of three translations, one short lyric by the mid-nineteenth century Spanish poet, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and two short lyrics by contemporary Latin American poets, Fabio Fiallo of the Dominican Republic and Rufino Blanco-Fombona of Venezuela. All three poems are natural extensions of the love poetry she herself had been writing; for example, Blanco-Fombona's "At Parting":

My love had known fifteen springs —     I kissed, and I pressed to me Her lips like a flower, her chestnut hair,     Beside a lyric sea. "Think of me; never forget,     No matter where I may be!" — And I saw a shooting star     Fall suddenly into the sea.

Her other two translations are equally poetic in their attempt to re-create the poetry of the original Spanish.

Four years later, in May 1924, Lee published an essay in the North American Review, titled "Contemporary Spanish-American Poetry," in which she provides an overview of major trends; it was done while preparing her project for Poetry. In attempting to answer two "fascinating" questions she poses — "What of the voices that sound most clearly above the chorus? What is their method, and what its results?" — she states: "A poet may express his environment in either of opposite ways: by an interpretation of it or by a reaction against it. Certainly the best contemporary example of the former method is José Santos Chocano; of the latter, Rubén Darío." She then discusses their work, providing as examples her translations of selected poems. In addition, she addresses those poets who revolted against the "shining and honied things" produced by Darío and the followers of his Modernismo.

Lee's feminism led her to consider Latin America's women poets as well: "the mystic who prefers to be known as Gabriela Mistral," who "is more often concerned with the invisible than with the visible world," but in whom is still found "the awakened social consciousness"; "that lovely and dauntless and irresistible seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sister Juana Inez of the Cross"; Uruguay's "most popular and very talented woman-poet, Juana de Ibarbourou"; and Alfonsina Storni of Argentina.

Comparing the poetry of last two poets, Lee says, "Alfonsina Storni's work, while sometimes carelessly finished, seems to me of firmer texture and more original quality than Juana de Ibarbourou's." More significant is Lee's comment that "both, however, show a new insight — new, at least, in the literature of their race [ethnicity] — into feminine psychology; the young Argentine speaking characteristically in 'Running Water'":

Yes, I move, I live, I wander astray —     Water running, intermingling, over the sands. I know the passionate pleasure of motion;     I taste the forests; I touch strange lands. Yes, I move — perhaps I am seeking     Storms, suns, dawns, a place to hide. What are you doing here, pale and polished —     You, the stone in the path of the tide?

This lyric would be the opening poem in the Spanish-American anthology she produced for Poetry.

In concluding her essay, Lee acknowledges that she had "simply offered a foot-note to a richly interesting literature of which we think too seldom." She ends by saying that "this ferment of creation to the south of us, in conjunction with our own quickened interest in poetry, is perhaps helping in the achievement of the Pan-American character." This character, she adds, requires a multicultural fusion — "a vision worth pondering."

Poetry's 1925 publication of its special issue devoted to the work of Latin American poets enabled Lee not only to pursue her new passion for the literary landscape of Latin America, but also to embrace the art of translation and its poetic challenges. In "A Word from the Translator," following the presentation of the poetry, she explains:

In making the English versions of these poems, my intention has been to reproduce, as nearly as possible in our very different vocables, the meaning, sound, and atmosphere of the Spanish. Our scarcity of feminine rhymes, as opposed to the Spanish abundance, has sometimes prevented an exact counterpart in rhythm, but I believe the rhythmic effect is always, to a fair degree, the same. […] In every case the original form has been reproduced with its pattern of rhyme, assonance, or unrhymed lines.

Acknowledging the limitations of her anthology, she says that it is "a suggestive collection, a cage in which humming-birds and parroquets, flamingoes and blackbirds are represented, as well as the condor and the tropic nightingale. It does little more than suggest, faithfully and gratefully, something of what readers of the poetry of our sister republics may expect to find." Nonetheless, this modest anthology gave many readers for the first time a strong introduction to the poetic brilliance and innovation of voices little known in North America.

Lee selected work by a wide range of poets, many of whom would later establish themselves as major figures; they represented fourteen Spanish-speaking countries of South America, including the Caribbean. In most cases, she offered one poem by each author. She presented work by most of the poets she had discussed in the North American Review: Darío, Chocano, Storni, Mistral, Ibarbourou, Enríque González Martínez, Luis Palés Matos, Leopoldo Lugones, and José Asuncíon Silva.

Her translation of Silva's "Nocturne" shows how well she herself could work with free verse, re-creating his poem with its expressive cadences and haunting music. At the same time, she understood the impossibilities of translation, and elsewhere said that "it is only partially translatable — that is, so much of its beauty depends upon the intricately braided jet and silver of its cadences that a great deal is necessarily lost by translation into a less liquid tongue." But also recognizing the poetic possibilities of translation, she added that "it has strength enough, however, to remain a poem even though some of the music vanishes — a poem which, even in translation, more than any other that I know, really chills the listener, across whose consciousness seems to blow the cold wind of mortality":

One night, One night filled with murmurs and perfumes and the music of wings, One night When fantastic fireflies blazed in the moist nuptial shadows, By my side slowly, clasped to me, paler and silent, As if a presentiment of infinite bitterness Agitated the most secret depths of your heart, Over the blossomy path through the meadow You wandered; And the full moon Scattered white light over bluish skies, boundless and deep. And your shadow, Frail and languid, And my shadow By the rays of the moon projected Over the gloomy sand, Joined together And were one, And were one, And were one, And were one long shadow, And were one long shadow, And were one long shadow.…

Concerning Silva's voice, she was quick to perceive the inter-American connection he had with Edgar Allan Poe; her essay, "Brother of Poe," published in the July 1926 issue of Southwest Review, is one of the earliest studies on the subject of Poe's influence on Silva.

All told, Lee's brief anthology successfully offered an impressive glimpse of the robust poetic activity in Latin America, and showed that, in the words of Poetry's editor, Harriet Monroe, "the Spanish-American style in poetry is more expansive than the modern fashion among our own poets has encouraged. One finds little of that stern compression which has been our discipline during most of the present century, and a more eloquent elaboration of motives than is instinctive in the Anglo-Saxon mind or customary in English speech." (The subsequent growth of North American poetry, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, would thrive on lessons learned from the vitality of this "Spanish-American style.")

In the preparation of this issue of Poetry, Lee was assisted by several Latin American poets and critics, including of course her husband. Muñoz contributed a commentary titled "A Glance at Spanish-American Poetry," appearing at the end of the issue. A brief account of major contemporary trends, his essay includes a remarkable statement about the significance of poetry written by women:

Perhaps the most interesting departure within the modernista movement — itself the most interesting of all departures in Spanish poetry since the century of Góngora and Quevedo — is the recent release of the lyrical tongues of women, which had hitherto spoken either not at all, or else with prim conventionality. Militant femininity — not feminism — has broken down formidable barriers of social prejudice with a sweep of glory.

With his well-known macho disposition, Muñoz had surely had his eyes opened to this new phenomenon by his wife who, by 1925, was becoming increasingly involved with American women's struggle for equal rights in society. Lee always challenged his thinking about women and their social roles. Just as her marriage with him was also a marriage with the literature and culture of Latin America (the one that never ended), his was a marriage with the ideas of the bold "new" American woman.

The Spanish-American issue of Poetry closes with Lee's review of the first book by Mexican poet Jaime Torres Bodet, in which she points out the "graphic quality in his phrases" and provides as an example of it her translation of the following image:

Silence, in some women, Is a bough heavy with birds.

Her selection of this particular image reveals more of her own concerns and temperament than the author's. It is, moreover, the final poetic image encountered in the entire issue which, as noted above, opens with her rendering of Storni's female voice. Like Storni, in whose works at the time the themes of love and feminism predominated, Lee would soon raise her powerful voice to champion women throughout the Americas, not in poetry but in the political arena.

The Bulletin of the Pan American Union — "believing that the road to that real understanding between nations which is the very essence of all Pan American ideals will be found in cultural rather than commercial or political contacts" — opened its July issue with an editorial tribute to Poetry's "Hispanic American edition," followed by a group of Lee's translations taken from it. Lee was described as "the ardent young Hispanist and poet who served as translator," and her achievement hailed as "a distinct contribution to Pan American letters and inter-American friendship."

In August 1925, Lee and Muñoz sold their house in Teaneck and moved back to New York. Together, they soon established their West Side apartment — on Riverside Drive above 100th Street — as a gathering place for literary figures, such as poets Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturensky, Sara Teasdale, William Rose Benét, and Constance Lindsay Skinner (see Jean Barman's Constance Lindsay Skinner). Indeed, their well-known Sunday night "open house" parties included these writers, among others, as well as teachers, explorers, diplomats, dilettantes, artists, revolutionaries, and mercenaries, even Spain's famous bullfighter, Juan Belmonte. Skinner, a close friend of Lee's, who then was working in New York as a literary critic for the New York Herald Tribune, was often co-hostess of these lively soirees, which had two firm rules: no invitation required, and no recitation of anyone's poetry.

"Why," a poet friend asked Lee at one of them, "do you insist so on wildflowers and rain?" She replied:

In his autobiographical work, The House on Jefferson Street, Horace Gregory recalls the Sunday night parties he attended at the home of Lee and Muñoz:

Gregory adds that on those Sunday nights, he felt part of "a more recent, more 'serious,' somehow more responsible generation than that which drifted off to Paris soon after World War I." This seriousness was an everlasting quality of Lee's character. The daily realities of her present life demanded it, with motherhood and household duties, reading and writing work, not to mention marriage. Furthermore, her politics compelled her to take life seriously and take part in society.

The period of the mid-1920s also saw Lee expand her work as a literary translator to include prose from Latin America — the translation of which was a labor of love she pursued throughout her life. In the spring of 1926, her critically-acclaimed rendering of (General) Rafael de Nogales's Four Years Beneath the Crescent was published by Scribner's. The war memoirs of a Venezuelan soldier of fortune serving with Ottoman forces in Turkey and the Near East during the First World War, the original Spanish had just been published in Spain in 1924. The author's observations of the massacres in the Near East made him distinctly persona non grata in the official quarters from whence issued the laconic order to burn — demolish — kill. Luckily he escaped assassination and, receiving honorable discharge from the army, returned to Venezuela to write these memoirs.

The publication of Lee's translation of his adventure story created a sensation among critics. Highly favorable reviews appeared everywhere. The New York Times said that "the book, delightfully and feelingly written, would be worth its weight in thrills, if every page weighed a ton, as a tale of chivalry in the age of iron." The Review of Reviews said that "one should not dismiss it as merely a narrative of a soldier of fortune. It is that and much more." The Boston Evening Transcript called it an "engrossing volume" — and at 416 pages it was a sizeable volume. Acknowledging the literary feat of Lee's translation, the New York Herald Tribune said:

Indeed, giving a strong voice to others, whether by means of translation and other forms of writing or by use of the podium, had become the focus of Lee's career.

Speaking Out for Pan-American Women

Energetic as always, Lee ran their large household. The paper prospered under his directorship, and for the first time the family was financially secure. Nonetheless, in addition to her responsibilities at home and her continued literary activity, Lee started to work for the University of Puerto Rico, in January 1927, as director of its bureau of international relations. This position appealed to her interest in Pan-American cultural affairs. It gave her a position of her own in the world, as well, outside of the home. She would hold it for more than a decade; with the exception of a two-year leave of absence in the early 1930s to work for the feminist National Woman's Party (NWP) as director of national activities.

As the university's lead publicist, she prepared daily press releases in both Spanish and English; wrote a daily newspaper column on international, educational, and cultural relations, about which she would lecture widely; and acted as liaison with educational and cultural representatives in the United States, the other American republics, Spain, and England. She would also write and edit numerous special publications for the university, and find time to teach English literature there. In the years to come, she prepared and supervised radio programs, as well as inter-American literary conferences. It was a position that challenged her intellectually and creatively. It also kept her close to the literary scenes in both South and North America.

Soon after arriving in Puerto Rico in 1926, Lee became actively involved with the women's suffrage movement there, which had been gathering momentum since the turn of the century. She had long been a supporter of the suffrage movement in the United States, and the young NWP founded by Alice Paul, who spearheaded the movement's drive to victory in 1920. When Paul led pickets on the Wilson White House, and brought thousands of women from across the country to march for equality, Lee was always cheering for them; for it was her cause, too.

Having fully identified herself with the struggle of women for equal rights in a democratic society, Lee naturally embraced the cause of her sisters in Puerto Rico. Throughout the island, she gave speeches and wrote articles defending their right to vote; the island's legislature, in 1929, would finally pass a law granting "literate" women the vote (universal suffrage was not won for all Puerto Rican women until six years later).

During the course of her feminist activism in Puerto Rico, Lee formed close ties with the leadership of the NWP. Since the passage of suffrage, the party's primary goal had been (and still is) to educate the public about the Equal Rights Amendment. Education was the tool the party used to create change — an approach in which Lee had undying faith. Just five years before Lee returned to Puerto Rico, Paul had authored the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing "equal justice under the law" for all citizens, regardless of their gender. This proposed amendment articulated what Lee had long believed was a social right of not only the women of the United States, but of all women in the Americas and the rest of the world.

Lee's unique position as both an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico — a virtual native in many people's eyes, given her marriage — and a born citizen of the United States, combined with her brilliant political mind and her rhetorical powers, gave her the credentials to speak out on behalf of Pan-American women. She had already established herself as a leading member of the Puerto Rican branch of the NWP.

In January 1928, as the delegate representing the women of Puerto Rico, she went to Havana to join forces with a large group from the NWP led by Doris Stevens, chair of the party's committee on international action. This group, composed of women from the United States as well as other nations of the Americas, had gathered there to confront the Sixth Pan-American Conference (of the twenty-one member nations of the Pan American Union), in order to demand an audience for women's rights. Specifically, Lee and her sister feminists wanted the members of the conference to ratify a treaty giving equal rights to men and women before the law in all twenty-one countries of the Pan American Union; drafted by Paul of the NWP, the proposed treaty was intended to move the consideration of women's rights into political debates throughout the hemisphere.

In her published report of the event, which later appeared in the Nation as a letter to the editor, Lee recounted:

Despite the expectations raised five years earlier, in 1923, not one woman was included in the delegation of any country. Lee noted that the "Sixth Conference […] certainly did not dream of a feminine invasion. Women had never disturbed the Pan-American delegates by so much as a petition." The conference delegates argued that only they were allowed to speak on the floor and that the meeting's agenda had no room for discussion of a treaty on equal rights.

After a month of protests and active campaigning in Havana, the women were finally allowed a voice at the conference. They had successfully petitioned to gain the necessary "invitation" for an open hearing. For the first time women would officially speak at a plenary and public session. Lee and seven others — including two women from the United States, four from Cuba, and one from the Dominican Republic — presented their case briefly and urgently.

To hear their speeches, women thronged the galleries, staircases, and the conference floor of the University of Havana's great hall. Lee described the scene in her report:

Addressing the conference with brilliant poise, Lee spoke elegantly and intelligently; and like the NWP's lead speaker, Doris Stevens, she invoked the ideals of Pan-Americanism:

Furthering her idea of a "Pan America" where freedom and equality truly reign, for she was also the only person representing Puerto Rico in any way at the conference, she stated:

In an editorial that appeared on the afternoon following the women's speeches, Cuba's leading newspaper said that "we are glad the conference granted the women that hearing, else we should likely have seen something comparable to the storming of the Bastille!"

The Equal Rights Treaty was not ratified. However, Lee and her group of feminists did gain an immediate response from the delegates of the conference, who unanimously voted to have the report on equal rights received and discussed in plenary session rather than in one committee. When that report was made, a resolution was passed declaring that an Inter-American Commission of Women be organized to prepare information to enable the next Pan-American Conference to study constructively the civil and political equality of women. The commission would initially consist of seven women designated by the Pan American Union, and the number would be increased by the commission itself until each of the twenty-one member nations gained representation in it. The first inter-governmental agency in the world created expressly to ensure recognition of the civil and political rights of women, the commission was destined to form an integral part of the Pan American Union and subsequently the Organization of American States.

The creation of the commission, of which Stevens would serve as its first president, reflected the growing cooperation between the women of North and South America, a Pan-American sisterhood in which Lee would play a leading role in the years to come. In the Nation, she noted that "the enthusiasm and energy of the Cuban women was [an] unequivocal answer to all who had ever said (and how many they have been!) that the Latin woman does not want her rights; that the Latin woman will not speak in public; that the Latin woman is bound by customs which she cannot break." She concluded her report with a bold statement of her conviction: "The struggle for equal rights has become an inter-American movement. The women of no country will look upon the cause as won until it is won for all. Here at last is a unity of ideal and effort which establishes a real, a spontaneous, a spiritual commonwealth of Pan-America."

During the summer of 1928 (as well as 1929), Lee took a leave from the University of Puerto Rico to work as director of public relations for the Inter-American Commission of Women in Washington. After prolonged consultations with jurists and feminists, Stevens had decided that the vexed subject of the nationality of women would be the first subject of research by the commission. Lee conducted juridical research for this project, in addition to doing public relations work for the commission, and helping run its office.

To help gain support for the commission, she wrote articles and gave lectures about it. In the October 1929 issue of Pan-American Magazine, she published one such article, "The Inter-American Commission of Women: A New International Venture," in which she said:

In addition to doing articles and lectures in English, she did the same in Spanish, spreading the good news throughout the Americas.

With the World on Her Back

Lee's marriage with Muñoz had become increasingly strained ever since their return to Puerto Rico in 1926. Their lives were diverging as they pursued their different passions for public life and politics, as when he had left her for the island in 1923. The family's financial security did not last long. In the summer of 1927, for largely political reasons, he was forced out of his job at La democracia and went to live in New York without Lee and their children. He had told a colleague "the flame trees" were giving him "indigestion," and that he needed to spend some time in New York, where "the evening lights of Fifth Avenue, as agreeable as usual, are a marvelous tonic." He staid at the swanky Vanderbilt Hotel, on the corner of Park Avenue and 34th Street. Initially, he busied himself as the representative of the Economic Commission of the Legislature of Puerto Rico, with the purpose of persuading American businessmen to invest in the island's economic development.

Two months after Muñoz had left, he sent Lee a cable from New York. He was flat broke, and needed her to send him some money; he had spent almost all of what little he had. At the time, Lee was essentially the main supporter of her household, on her annual starting salary of $1800 from the University of Puerto Rico. She responded to him with a letter that said:

Your cable yesterday afternoon inspired me (you will forgive me?) with a wild desire to shriek with laughter. Doubtless you will realize why, reading the letter I had just mailed you before receiving the cable. I am so sorry you are in difficulties but I can do nothing. I can't even send you a cable saying "Impossible." I can appeal to no one. […] You must learn to select, to control, to manage, Luis, if you are ever to have any comfort or pleasure in life — or any freedom. I know you have had a very difficult two months. So have I. The Democracia has not paid Mamá anything so far this month […]. I not only cannot help you in any financial way, but I shall be utterly lost and undone if you cannot manage to help us immediately. Believe me, our need is desperate, or I should not beg for money — and continue to beg. […] It is hard for me to write about anything but money because that is what fills my mind and keeps me awake nights. We cannot help you, Luis. I don't know how you can arrange to help us, but you must.

Despite this tension which eased only sporadically, at the start of 1928, Lee and Muñoz were together in Havana at the Pan-American Conference, where he was relegated to the role of an English-Spanish interpreter. But then she went back to Puerto Rico, and he to New York. For nearly three years, he lived there on his own, earning some money from his writing, and also enjoying himself, as when he bought a beat-up Ford and traveled across the country.

In January 1930, Lee published her "Rich Port" in Mencken's American Mercury. This confessional poem, which later appeared in several anthologies, records her own misery in terms of Puerto Rico's. The poem alludes to the devastating earthquake of 1918; its epicenter was located northwest of Aguadilla in the Mona Canyon (between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic). Accompanied by a tidal wave that was twenty feet high, the earthquake had a magnitude of nearly eight on the Richter scale, and caused severe damage to numerous houses, factories, public buildings, bridges, and other structures. Here the devastation that Lee's marriage had suffered is likened to this natural disaster with its foreboding of doom:

This desperately tilted plane of land, our island, Toppling from its gaunt sea-rooted pillar, Slanted ever more definitely toward the sea-floor, Toward that bottomless rift in the floor of Mona Passage, Slipping,          sliding,                   creeping,                            ever more surely This doomed beloved rock edging inch by inch with the earthquakes Toward implacable disaster, Some day will lurch, will plunge, the long tension ended, And the ceibas and the yellow fortress and the lizards and the market-place, The wild beauty of mountain cliffs hung with blue morning-glories, Immaculate cane-fields and the cool breath of coffee-groves, Thatched hovels and trolley cars and Ponce de Leon's palace, Flame-trees and tree-ferns and frail white orchises, My love and your pride, All, all will lie in crushed indeterminate wreckage for a thousand     thousand years In the crevasse beneath the floor of Mona Passage, With aeons of sea creatures moving lightly through the heavy masses     of water Far above the shattered nameless shards That in 1930 were you and I                            And flame-trees and Porto Rico.

When Muñoz returned from New York to Puerto Rico in early 1930, Lee was living with their children and his mother, and he stayed at the Palace Hotel. They would later live together in a certain fashion for a few years, however, before separating for good. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when, but he would ultimately leave her for another woman, a political associate of his, named Inés Mendoza, with whom he started a relationship in the late 1930s. The daughter of an illiterate jíbaro (peasant), she had become a schoolteacher, then joined Muñoz's peaceful revolution to free the poor jíbaros from hunger. She worked closely with him in his grassroots campaign, and traveled with him all over the island (in 1938, he recalls in a memoirs, in the "human and spiritual sense" his marriage with her began).

Doing for Others and for Herself

One of Lee's most important personal friendships was with journalist and feminist Ruby Black, who lived in Washington. They had been friends for several years, meeting through the women's movement, possibly first in Chicago. Black served the NWP as an editor of Equal Rights; for income, she ran her own news bureau serving daily newspapers in seven states. Lee's friendship with her would prove to be very significant for Puerto Rico, as well, because through her Muñoz was later able to meet Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR at the White House, and to gain their support for the cause of the island. (Black's relationship with ER started in 1933 when she covered her for the United Press, since the first lady allowed only women at her press conferences.)

While in Washington, Lee still found time to spend a term as associate editor of the Carillon, a quarterly magazine of poetry published there, and to contribute poems to Poetry, American Mercury, Commonweal, and New Republic, among other magazines.

The occasion of the first Pan American Day on April 14, 1931, inspired Lee to write "Pan American Day in the Park," an apparently unpublished work. It is a poem of protest, as much as it is a poem calling for Pan-Americanism. The new holiday called Pan American Day was (and still is) observed throughout the Americas; the date was chosen to commemorate April 14, 1890, when the Pan American Union was established. It became an annual event celebrating the diverse cultures of the Americas and stressing inter-American goodwill. But in 1931, the first year of the holiday, U.S. intervention had been taking place in Nicaragua for four years, and a pure celebration of Pan-Americanism was at odds with the political reality. In a departure from her confessional love poetry, Lee's narrative verse protests the abandonment of the American ideal of liberty:

This poem expresses Lee's commitment to social justice that was at the heart of her work for the NWP — namely, equal rights. It defines the Pan-American ideal of freedom for all. Interestingly, the final line of the fourth stanza had originally depicted the nations of the Americas living "close in friendship side by side." Reflecting her feminist consciousness, her revision portrays them as sisters, and thus creates the image of the American nations as family.

Returning to Puerto Rico late in the summer of 1932, she resumed her work for the university, as well as living with Muñoz. She continued to produce poems and essays in both English and Spanish, and also translations of work by Latin American writers. Her "Ballad," which appeared in Poetry in the fall of that year, is reminiscent of her early love lyrics. It closes a sequence of five poems under the title "Carib Summer." This particular lyric reveals her return to a painful struggle with love and the madness of it:

Only poetry offered her the language of indirection that she needed to validate her personal reality and to speak openly of the disaster her marriage had become, like her former "tale of old romance." The month after the October publication of her "Carib Summer," Muñoz was elected to Puerto Rico's Senate. The wife of a prominent public figure, Lee was known throughout the Americas by her married name, Señora Muna Lee de Muñoz Marín, and also as Mrs. Luis Muñoz Marín. But she always signed her own name to her poetry publications, and in this way further affirmed her own identity.

Her "Deliverance," published in the American Mercury in the spring of the following year, articulates an acceptance of her being on her own again, and an affirmation of the silver in the dark cloud of her life, namely, independence. The poem's very style expresses her independence, as much as it shows the influence of contemporary trends:

Romantic love — "the thought that lures and lingers and brightens the mind's dark crevice" — would no longer shape her life. She had become more self-reliant, in more ways than one, since writing her early lyric, "I Who Had Sought God" (later retitled "The Seeker"). Then, she was turning "blindly" to God with "a weary throng of [existential] questions" in her grief-stricken soul, "listening for heaven to thunder forth" her name. Now, as she says in "Deliverance": "If the awful apocalyptic vision flare and thunder about me, / Only within myself need I seek for a clue and a meaning."

Still, she struggled with the loneliness that her failed marriage had imposed upon her. Her "Alcatraz," published in Poetry in 1934, echoes the sentiment of the group of lyrics in Sea-Change called "Imprisoned," and depicts this imposed solitude, and her implicit struggle to endure her husband's abandonment of her, like the abandonment of her youth in the Southwest, which had left her feeling cut off from life:

The actual Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay had just that year been converted from a military prison into a federal prison, which was touted as virtually escape proof. Lee's lonely private life with its "harsh certainty of stone" marital reality felt that way to her. Like any prisoner, she envied the freedom of birds. But by taking flight with words in the composition of poetry, she found for herself "renewal of endurance" and "rapture" to help sustain her spirit.

At the same time, while forced to be so self-reliant, she had found a good measure of love in her relationship with her children, as shown in the opening poem of her "Carib Summer." Titled "Garden Episode," this poem celebrates her paternal grandmother and her daughter, Munita, then twelve years old:

The poem elaborates the differences and similarities that Lee could see in the line of women in her family, culminating with her Latin daughter, in whom she recognized her Anglo-Saxon grandmother:

It was Lee's grandmother who had instilled in her as a child an abiding love of flowers, which later would not merely decorate her poetry, but form an important element of its character. In celebrating her daughter of color with "the sudden flaming in her cheek and brow" and seeing in her a distinctive trait of this grandmother, Lee also celebrates the ethnic diversity and fusion of Latin- and Anglo-American cultures that she believed was the hope for the future of the Americas.

By 1935, as seen in her "Lyric to the Sun" which appeared in Commonweal, Lee could write more openly about her estrangement from Muñoz. She could say it in public. But more than that, she had moved beyond her resentment of his abandonment of her, and could celebrate life:

Not only did Lee write serious poetry during these years, she also composed lighthearted verse which she published in newspapers and popular magazines. On December 31, 1935, in the famous "The Conning Tower" column in the New York Herald Tribune, columnist Franklin P. Adams wrote whimsically: "We shall never be satisfied until we see a poem about Mauna Loa by Muna Lee" (located in Hawaii, Mauna Loa, the Earth's largest volcano, had just erupted again for the ninth time since 1900). Two months later, Lee responded with these lines, which appeared in "The Conning Tower" under the title "On Not Writing about Mauna Loa":

Among her diverse activities as a writer during the 1930s, Lee also branched out into murder mysteries — for fun and profit.

Between 1934 and 1938, under the pen name of Newton Gayle (her maternal grandmother's maiden name), she co-authored five mystery novels with Maurice Guinness, an Englishman and Shell Oil executive stationed in the Caribbean, who lived in San Juan: Death Follows a Formula (1935), The Sentry Box Murder (1935), Death in the Glass (1937), Murder at 28:10 (1936), and Sinister Crag (1938). A friend of Lee's, Guinness was married to the daughter of Dr. Bailey K. Ashford, whom Lee had celebrated in her 1928 essay, "Conquistador for Science," published in the North American Review.*

Their novels feature a wry British sleuth who solves crimes in Britain, the United States, and Puerto Rico, while occasionally referencing broader political themes. No less a publisher than Scribner's issued them; they received decent reviews, and were translated into Spanish and Italian. Although they lack the psychological torture required to satisfy more recent taste, they are still good reading — especially Murder at 28:10 for its ravaging hurricane in San Juan. About this book, which involves the murder of a Roosevelt New Dealer bent on Puerto Rican reform, the New Statesman and Nation said:

Of special interest is the occasional use of bilingual dialogue, which confronts readers with Spanish for the sake of literary verisimilitude, but also for the Pan-American challenge of it. Beyond that, Lee's contribution of vivid descriptions to the narrative is readily apparent, as seen in this passage about the impending hurricane:

The distinctive cadences of Lee's prose, together with her characteristic use of flower images to signify the goodness of nature, reveal her poetic voice. Guinness had nothing like it. Earlier in her career as a writer, during the mid-1920s, she had attempted to write an autobiographical novel; it was to be called Frontier — "the frontier of life, of course," she said, "as well as the other thing," namely, her life in Oklahoma — but it never came to fruition. She was essentially a poet, not a novelist.

During the 1930s, her professional activities were, as always, wide-ranging. In 1930, she started serving as a permanent member of the Council of the Poetry Society of America. From 1933 to 1939, she was literary and foreign news editor of La democracia. Since 1932, she was a contributing editor to Books Abroad, the worldly journal from Norman, Oklahoma, as well as contributing editor to Equal Rights, the weekly (until 1934), then semimonthly, magazine published by the NWP. In 1937, she edited Art in Review, a special retrospective issue of the University of Puerto Rico Bulletin that celebrated a decade of artistic development in Puerto Rico, which was published in December of that year.

In August 1939, on the campus of the University of Puerto Rico, Lee addressed the biennial Congress of the World Federation of Education Associations held there, at the unveiling of the bronze plaque commemorating the centenary of Eugenio María de Hostos, the Puerto Rican writer, patriot, and educational reformer (founder of the modern educational systems in Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela). The plaque for Hostos's statue on the campus had been authorized by the Eighth Pan-American Conference. At the ceremony by the statue where the Congress delegates were gathered, Lee delivered her address which focused on the international significance of Hostos as an educator. It was an elegant and erudite speech that she began with charm and humor in a retrospective look at the world in 1839, the year of Hostos's birth:

After reviewing Hostos's achievements and legacy, she ended on a stirring note showing her capacity for rhetorical brilliance:

Her ability to shine at such public appearances and performances had grown over the years through her experience in a range of different contexts.

The 1930s saw Lee rise to prominence throughout the Americas for her diverse literary and political work. She had appeared in every edition of Who's Who in America since 1928. She appeared in the first (1933–34) and second (1936–37) editions of Quien es quien en Puerto Rico (Who's Who in Puerto Rico). The 1939–40 edition of the biographical dictionary, American Women (the official who's who of the women of the nation), included the basic information about her, along with a subtle revelation of her personality seen in the "hobby" category, where she entered just one thing: "islands." It is, moreover, noteworthy that the 1940 Federal Writers' Project publication, Puerto Rico: A Guide to the Island of Boriquén, listed her among the important "contemporary Puerto Rican writers" in its chapter on the island's cultural life, describing her as "a continental American living in Puerto Rico" who had "gained her high reputation as a poet on the mainland."

In April 1940, Holland's, The Magazine of the South published a glowing feature about her titled "Muna Lee: Poet and Feminist." She was at the time an active member of the Ibero-American Institute of the University of Puerto Rico, and of the governing council of the World Woman's Party founded by Alice Paul. This newly-organized international feminist venture was made urgent by the precarious position of women around the world; the party was dedicated to preserving and extending equality for women, and combating attempts in international treaties to take away their rights to employment, among other injustices. In Holland's, in response to the question about how she started writing poetry, Lee said:

Not mentioned was her lifelong and fierce inner need to gain, through the act of creation, a sense of order in her life of emotional extremes, and also to speak in public what only poetry allows, the truth and beauty of things that she forever sought and needed to articulate for her personal well-being.

Working for Pan-American Union