Mary Adella Wolcott
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Mary Adella Wolcott (November 13, 1879 – ?) was a Jamaican poet who wrote under the pen name Tropica.
Mary Adella Wolcott | |
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Born | November 13, 1879 Saint Mary Parish |
Occupation | Poet |
Mary Adella Wolcott was born on November 13, 1879 in St. Mary's, Jamaica, the daughter of white American missionaries Henry Berdin Wolcott and Sarah Boardman Paddock.[1] Her grandfather, a white American Baptist missionary named Seth Taylor Wolcott, purchased an estate named Richmond in Saint Mary Parish and created a small manual labor school for blacks. Her father had been disinterested in Richmond and in 1941 she unsuccessfully attempted to engage the Jamaican government in creating "an industrial school, a baby Tuskegee".[2]
Wolcott attended Oberlin Academy in Oberlin, Ohio from 1896 to 1898[3] and graduated from the Drexel Institute Library School in 1908.[4]
Wolcott published a single volume of poetry, The Island of Sunshine. Her work romanticizes plantation-era Jamaica from an ethnographic and colonial perspective. Her "Nana" is an elegy for a black nanny and her disappearing cultural traditions, while "Busha's Song" frames an overseer as the pastor of the plantation.[5] Her work was later anthologized by J. E. Clare McFarlane.
In 1923, Wolcott was a founder of the Jamaica Poetry League, an offshoot of the Empire Poetry League.[6]