thumb|upright=1.2|alt=A fine charcoal portrait of Ina Coolbrith in her 30s or 40s, shown from the neck up, wearing a garment with a high, open collar made of lace, with hair curled and secured atop the head, looking slightly to the left. A fountain pen signature is below the portrait, reading "Ina Coolbrith", the letter "c" writ large to sweep underneath the next five letters. |Ina Coolbrith in the 1880s
Ina Donna Coolbrith (born Josephine Donna Smith; March 10, 1841 – February 29, 1928) was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the "Sweet Singer of California", she was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state.
Coolbrith, born the niece of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith, left the Mormon community as a child to enter her teens in Los Angeles, California, where she began to publish poetry. She terminated a youthful failed marriage to make her home in San Francisco, and met writers Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard with whom she formed the "Golden Gate Trinity" closely associated with the literary journal Overland Monthly. Her poetry received positive notice from critics and established poets such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She held literary salons at her home in Russian Hill—in this way she introduced new writers to publishers. Coolbrith befriended the poet Joaquin Miller and helped him gain global fame.
While Miller toured Europe and lived out their mutual dream of visiting Lord Byron's tomb, Coolbrith cared for his Wintu daughter and members of her own family. As a result, she came to reside in Oakland and accepted the position of city librarian. Her poetry suffered as a result of her long work hours, but she mentored a generation of young readers including Jack London and Isadora Duncan. After she served for 19 years, Oakland's library patrons called for reorganization, and Coolbrith was fired. She moved back to San Francisco and was invited by members of the Bohemian Club to be their librarian.
Coolbrith began to write a history of California literature, including much autobiographical material, but the fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake consumed her work. Author Gertrude Atherton and Coolbrith's Bohemian Club friends helped set her up again in a new house, and she resumed writing and holding literary salons. She traveled by train to New York City several times and, with fewer worldly cares, greatly increased her poetry output.
On June 30, 1915, Coolbrith was named California's poet laureate, and she continued to write poetry for eight more years. Her style was more than the usual melancholic or uplifting themes expected of women—she included a wide variety of subjects in her poems, which were noted as being "singularly sympathetic" and "palpably spontaneous". California poet laureate Carol Muske-Dukes wrote of Coolbrith's poems that, though they "were steeped in a high tea lavender style", influenced by a British stateliness, "California remained her inspiration."
Early life
thumb|left|upright|alt=A soft photographic portrait of a girl approximately 11 years old, shown from the neck up, wearing a simple dark garment with no collar, her hair parted in the middle and falling straight to frame her cheeks, turning to ringlets at her neck and shoulders, the head tilted slightly to the right, the eyes looking directly forward. The image shows loss of detail from wear.|Coolbrith in her youth
Ina Coolbrith was born Josephine Donna Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois, the last of three daughters of Agnes Moulton Coolbrith and Don Carlos Smith, brother to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Coolbrith's father died of malarial fever four months after her birth, and a sister died one month after that;
Coolbrith, sometimes called "Josephina" or just "Ina", wrote poems beginning at age 11, first publishing "My Ideal Home" in a newspaper in 1856, writing as Ina Donna Coolbrith.
In April 1858, at the age of 17, Coolbrith married Robert Bruce Carsley, an iron worker and part-time actor. However, she experienced abuse at his hands, She published poems in The Californian, a new literary newspaper formed in 1864 and edited by Harte and Charles Henry Webb. In July 1868, Coolbrith supplied a poem, "Longing", for the first issue of the Overland Monthly, and served unofficially as co-editor with Harte in selecting poems, articles and stories for the periodical. She became a friend of actress and poet Adah Menken, Coolbrith also worked as a schoolteacher for extra income.
For a decade, Coolbrith supplied one poem for each new issue of the Overland Monthly. After the 1866 publication of four of her poems in an anthology edited by Harte, Coolbrith's "The Mother's Grief" was positively reviewed in The New York Times. Another poem, "When the Grass Shall Cover Me", appeared unattributed in an anthology of John Greenleaf Whittier's favorite works by other poets, entitled Songs of Three Centuries (1875); Coolbrith's poem was judged the best of that group.
Coolbrith's literary work connected her with poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and naturalist John Muir, as well as Charles Warren Stoddard who also helped Harte edit the Overland Monthly. As editors and arbiters of literary taste, Harte, Stoddard and Coolbrith were known as the "Golden Gate Trinity". Stoddard once said that Coolbrith never had any of her literary submissions returned from a publisher. Coolbrith met writer and critic Ambrose Bierce in 1869, and by 1871 when he was courting Mary Ellen Day, Bierce organized friendly card games between himself, Day, Coolbrith and Stoddard. Bierce felt that Coolbrith's best poems were "California", the commencement ode she wrote for the University of California in 1871, and "Beside the Dead", written in 1875.
thumb|left|alt=A finely detailed monochrome photograph portrait of a bearded and mustachioed man in his 30s or 40s, shown from the waist up, wearing a jacket and vest over a white shirt with its collar closed by a cravat secured by a jeweled finger ring, a multi-corded watch fob hanging from a vest button, decorated by another ring, the man's hands together in his lap, his body leaning to the left and the head turned to the right, his dark hair full and long in the back, long but thin on top, revealing a high forehead|[[Joaquin Miller in the 1870s]]
In mid-1870, Coolbrith met the eccentric poet Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, newly divorced from his second wife, and introduced him to the San Francisco literary circle at the suggestion of Stoddard. Miller quoted Tennyson in describing Coolbrith as "divinely tall, and most divinely fair". When Coolbrith discovered that Miller was enamored of the heroic, tragic life of the legendary Californio outlaw Joaquin Murrieta, she suggested that Miller take the name Joaquin Miller as his pen name, and also that he dress the part with longer hair and a more recognizably mountain man-style costume.