Imagination’s Music

Imagination’s Music: From Youth to Old Age

This book begins with a selection of Christy’s poems published when she was twenty-one in Out of Chrysalis and Wind in the Grass. In the first poem, “Up!” she celebrates the sprouting forces of organic growth that she senses in the grasses and trees and feels so strongly within herself. “To Run on Hills” conveys the same exuberant, almost mythical oneness with nature.

The second and third sections of the book are comprised of hitherto unpublished poems written in midlife and old age. As her youthful forces dwindled, Christy turned increasingly toward an inner source that grew stronger and more definite in her old age.

Throughout her last years, Christy’s poetry often focused on the immediate impressions of her surroundings, which she portrayed with the utmost simplicity, wonder, and devotion. She explores the deep correspondence between the world within and the outer world of nature. Gone is the youthful vitality of her early poems, replaced by a mood of peace, permeated by the inner sun of her experience. As in all of her poems, we feel the imagination where inner and outer merge in a creative act, revealing a deeper dimension of reality.

Christy MacKaye Barnes was born in New Hampshire and went to boarding school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After two years at college, she traveled with her sister Arvia to Europe and, in Dornach, joined the Anthroposophical Society. When she returned to the U.S., she published a book of poems, Wind-in-the-Grass. She married Henry Barnes in 1939 and, a year later during a visit with Marie Steiner, received a diploma for the art of speech. Later, she played a part in Rudolf Steiner’s Portal of Initiation,directed by Hans Pusch. She went on to become a Waldorf teacher, the editor of Journal for Anthroposophy, and numerous other activities. She and Henry moved to Hillsdale, New York, where they were instrumental in establishing the community in Hawthorne Valley/Harlemville. Christy gradually assumed management of Adonis Press, which has published two of her books: A Wound Awoke Me (1994) and Arvia MacKaye Ege: Pioneer for Anthroposophy (1995). She died in 2002.