Elisabeth Cavazza

Died 1926

Elisabeth Cavazza was an American poet and critic who reviewed books and music for the Portland press. Later known as Elisabeth Pullen, she wrote Calabrian stories and literary parodies. In her introduction to The City of Dreadful Night, she admired James Thomson’s poetry while disputing his view of life.

A literary life in Portland

Born Elisabeth Jones in Portland, Maine, Cavazza grew up speaking English and Italian and received musical training in singing, piano, harmony and counterpoint. Her father, Charles Jones, was a Portland businessman who died while she was young. Literature became her profession through the local press: Stanley T. Pullen, editor of the Portland Daily Press, encouraged her to review books, and she also wrote unsigned verse, sketches and music criticism.

Her literary parodies won attention beyond Maine. In a contemporary account, Pullen recalled that admirers at New York’s Century Club sent her an invitation after reading Algernon in London, a parody of Swinburne’s dramatic manner. They had assumed its author was a man. Another parody, Algernon, the Foot-Stool Bearer, drew a friendly response from Robert Browning. These exchanges encouraged her literary work.

In 1885 she married Nino Cavazza of Modena, who died shortly afterwards. She continued publishing under the Cavazza name, developing fiction about southern Italian life alongside criticism for the Boston Literary World and editorial work on Italian literature for the Transatlantic. Don Finimondone collected her Calabrian sketches in 1892; her later fiction included Mr. Whitman. In 1894 she married Pullen and subsequently signed work Elisabeth Pullen. She also wrote poems for public commemorations, including Portland’s Longfellow statue and the Longfellow centenary. She died in 1926.

Reading Thomson without accepting his despair

Books and contributions

1 work in the current library

The City of Dreadful Night

James Thomson; introduction by E. Cavazza

Poetry & Literature

Sources and further reading

Thomas B. Mosher’s Portland edition of The City of Dreadful Night appeared in 1892 with Cavazza’s introduction, signed that November. Thomson wrote the poem; Cavazza’s contribution was the substantial critical essay that precedes it. She drew on his biographers Henry Salt and Bertram Dobell while examining how insomnia, bereavement and melancholy entered the imagined city.

Cavazza admired the poem’s sustained imaginative force without treating its pessimism as a complete account of life. She argued that readers could respond compassionately to the suffering it expressed and appreciate its literary achievement while resisting its conclusions. Her discussion follows its changing metres, symbolic inhabitants and final image of Dürer’s Melancholia, connecting formal choices with the pressure of its dominant mood.

Her explanation also uses the medical and hereditary language of her period, presenting pessimism as a kind of illness and offering a tentative account of Thomson’s temperament. Those judgments belong to her historical interpretation rather than an established diagnosis. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of close attention and disagreement: a critic versed in poetry and music trying to describe the power of a work whose outlook she did not share.