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1887–1961 and after · Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana (boundary); no Osceola tie found
The head of the line is Sister M. Madeleva Wolff, CSC — born Mary Evaline Wolff on 24 May 1887 at Cumberland, Wisconsin; entered Saint Mary's College in 1906 and the Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1908; third president of Saint Mary's College from 1934 to 1961; founder of its Graduate School of Sacred Theology in 1943–44, the first such school for women in the United States. She was a poet before she was a president and remained one through the presidency. Her bibliography is counted two ways in the sources reached, and both counts stand: twelve volumes of verse, and more than twenty books in all, among them The Four Last Things: Collected Poems (1959) and the autobiography My First Seventy Years (1959). Her working rule, quoted in the college's own record, was to publish under her religious name and to submit first to secular rather than Catholic magazines — "as a Catholic and a sister I would write well enough for acceptance by the secular press, or I would not write at all."
The line that followed her is carried at the size the reached record supports. Madeleva stood at the head of the mid-century sister-poets who published in the leading Catholic and secular journals of the 1930s–1950s — the circle the Jesuit America magazine's reviewers treated as a minor literary renaissance — and at Saint Mary's the campus line continued in the college's literary magazines, Chimes and The Avenue, which the college still publishes. A named, individual succession of Saint Mary's poets after 1961, and any living poet with a tie to this ground, could not be carried further from open sources: the succession by name is settled only by the Saint Mary's College archives and the runs of Chimes and The Avenue themselves. No poet born, formed, or resident in Osceola or Penn Township appears in the record reached; the poetry line of this ground is a college line, seated across the river from the city, and Osceola's share of it is readership, not poets.
Sources: Saint Mary's College records and president Katie Conboy's published essays (2023); U.S. Catholic / The Habit of Poetry (Fortress Press, 2023) excerpt for Madeleva's formation and ars poetica; poetry bibliographies for the 1959 titles.