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Show Teacher, Club Woman, Mother 171 because she was not, in every respect, the woman that Madelyn Stewart had dreamed of being. These deep feelings came out subtly, for Madelyn was not a didactic poet shaping little lessons into verse. She avoided the pathetic fallacy of endowing nature with human traits and feel ings in order to teach homilies. She was not, in a conventional sense, a religious poet, telling her readers how to live or what to believe. Her gift was to bring beauty into people's thoughts and feelings through story and verse. She felt the need to express her own and others' romantic dreams and reconcile them with the realities of a conventional, demanding world. II Poetry was self-reassuring and elevating, and involved Madelyn's imagination and creative intellect, but she also derived pleasure and satisfaction in using her gifts to teach the people in her LDS ward, Denver neighborhood, and Colorado schools and women's organizations. A small group of LDS res idents on the northeast side of Denver where the Silvers lived approved to form a branch, and that Denver North Branch became Crestmoor Ward in 1945. Madelyn and the were children were regularly in attendance; Harold was sometimes away, getting his inventions "on line." Madelyn and Harold helped organize a Church History Club of LDS people, and the couples met on a Friday evening once a month, with members taking turns giving papers or talks or reviewing books. To this group, when it came her turn, Madelyn talked on the history of the Mormons in Colorado, the Deseret Alphabet, Mormons and Mormon education, Buddhism, humor, and perhaps other top ics that are not clearly discerned in her notes. She helped devel op courses of study for the women's literary club she had joined, and gave talks in schools and the "circle" and study groups of various churches. Nearly all of these were on some aspect of American or British literature. There were book reviews of recent novels, "classic" novels, and short story anthologies, including The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph |
