Alice Davis Menken was “born to privilege in 1870 and [she] married into wealth in 1893,” as Michael D. Feldberg explains in Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History. Menken “dedicated her life to helping Jewish women less fortunate than herself" (p. 106).

We can guess from Alice Davis Menken’s personal papers—which live here at the Center for Jewish History in the AJHS collections—that her love of poetry played a significant role in her life experience. She saved clippings of poems from newspapers, carried poems in the inside pockets of her travel journals and copied the poems she loved into notebooks.

On this final day of National Poetry Month, then, we would like to feature two of the notebooks (above) of this reader of poetry—someone who, like us, recognized the importance of celebrating poetry year-round.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the blog’s National Poetry Month celebration! You can click here to review all of this year’s Poetry Month entries.