Ethel Allen Murphy

Ethel Allen Murphy is known for The Angel of Thought and Other Poems (1909), a poetry collection built around responses to paintings by artists including Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and Dürer. The book presents her as a writer deeply interested in art, beauty, and religious feeling, using poems to reimagine old-master images in lyrical form.

The surviving public record is sparse, but library catalogs also credit her with The Victory of the Gardens (1919), a pageant written for the United States School Garden Army. That suggests her writing ranged beyond private lyric poetry into occasional or civic work tied to public causes of the time.

Because so little biographical information is easy to confirm, her books remain the clearest introduction to her voice: thoughtful, image-rich, and strongly shaped by visual art. Readers coming to her today will likely find a poet whose work feels especially appealing at the meeting point of poetry, painting, and reflection.