Unnamed Lady Poet

The real name of the writer whom Gavin Stevens calls "a sound sensitive lady poet of the time of my youth" (191) in Intruder in the Dust is Djuna Barnes, well known in the years after World War I as part of the Modernist movement in the arts. Today she is best known as the author of the lesbian novel Nightwood (1936), but she was also a visual artist, a journalist and, as Gavin's description says, a poet. The lines he quotes are taken, with a line omitted, from Barnes' poem "To the Dead Favourite of Liu Ch'e" (1920).