Meet Helen

Helen Birch Bartlett

Glen Helen is a living memorial to Helen Birch Bartlett, a poet, composer, world traveler, and art collector. In 2025, we celebrate Helen, and recognize the 100th anniversary of her passing.

Helen Birch Bartlett

Poet ∙ Composer ∙ World Traveler ∙ Art Collector

Helen Birch Bartlett lived a life that was equal parts privilege and loss. She was born in Chicago, in 1884, at a time when the city was rapidly changing. Over her life, Chicago grew from a small city of five hundred thousand to a metropolis of over three million. Her parents, Hugh Taylor Birch and Maria Sophronia Root Birch, had three children. She was the youngest, and the only one to survive past her twenties. Her brother Carlton lived to the age of only four years old, dying before Helen was born. Her brother Hugh Jr passed in 1907 at the age of 28, her mother passed in 1913. Her father was a successful attorney and real estate speculator.

Her friend Janet Fairbank described Helen’s childhood: “Her parents were members of an intimate group of cultured people who valiantly insisted on the development of art in the crude new city they were helping to build. In her childhood, she heard great talk of creating a symphony orchestra and an art museum. She was taken assiduously to operas. In her mother’s house, she met the artists of the world, the singers and the painters and the writers… Her education was a singularly enlightened one for her period. She was taught mainly by governesses, and traveled much.”

Helen and her father Hugh were close. He had grown up in Yellow Springs, and developed a love of nature from many hours exploring the Glen. She shared this love of nature with him, and were frequent travel companions. In 1914, she came to Yellow Springs with him, her first, and possible only trip to the Glen that would come to bear her name. It is said that she loved the place and the visit deepened the love for nature that she shared with him.

He’ll know my birds and
My trees and my flowers
And in friendship or in strife
He’ll be a man as I love a man
And live a Good Man’s life.
From “Big Boss,” written by Helen, at age 15, about her father Hugh

Helen and Hugh were frequent visitors to Florida, where Hugh had acquired hundreds of acres of land in what has grown to become metropolitan Fort Lauderdale. She was drawn to Florida, and spent many winters there.

Helen in front of a saw palmetto in Florida

Helen was a fixture of the Chicago music scene, and a supporter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She herself studied music with the German expatriate Bernhard Ziehn, a music theorist and teacher of harmony and composition in Chicago. She also composed music, writing and publishing musical settings to poems by Yeats and Matthew Arnold, among others. Several of her published songs are housed at Chicago’s Newberry Library.

After gaining success publishing songs, Helen turned to a new form of artistic expression, poetry. She was a personal friend of Harriet Monroe, then the editor of Poetry magazine, widely regarded as America’s most significant poetry journal. For sake of propriety, Helen submitted poems for consideration under a pseudonym, only coming forward as the author once the journal had agreed to publish them. Her poems featured free verse, a writing style that was newly becoming popular. Often brief, frequently featured themes of joy, mortality, beauty, and nature. In 1927, her collected poems were published in Capricious Winds.

Little Joys

How sweet a thing it is,
The way hundreds of little joys
Will gather and chatter and huddle themselves, 
Lovingly, 
About a great sorrow!

In 1919, Helen married Frederick Clay Bartlett, a painter and art patron who, like her had come from a successful Chicago family. On land gifted by her father, Helen and Frederick built Bonnet House, named for the Bonnet lilies that grew in the area. Today, the house and its gardens are a museum, located across the street from Hugh Taylor Birch State Park

Helen and Frederick were frequent, and worldly, travelers. For their honeymoon, they traveled to Japan, China, and the Philippines. They made many trips to Europe, much of which fed, and was fed by, their passion for collecting art.

Helen and Frederick had a remarkable talent for anticipating which artists and paintings would become significant. The Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a testament to their vision. The collection showcases works that they acquired, painted by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and others. Their most celebrated acquisition is surely Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the masterpiece by Georges Seurat

Helen passed in October 1925, from breast cancer. She was only 42 years old. Her father sought to create a living memorial so that we might know Helen’s name and her legacy. With his expertise in real estate, and his knowledge of the wooded valleys on the eastern edge of Yellow Springs, he acquired the land so that it might be forever preserved in her name.

 

The Cascades Branch of the Yellow Springs Creek was renamed Birch Creek, and on a glacial boulder near a great white oak by the Cascades, a plaque was placed with an excerpt of Helen’s poem Up In The Hills.

The earth smells old and warm and mellow, and all things lie in peace.
I too serenely lie here under the white-oak tree, and know the splendid flight of hours all blue and gay, sun-drenched and still.

As you walk the Glen, think of Helen. Glen Helen is here, as a place to walk, learn, explore, and seek inspiration in nature because of her.

My Message

When I go,
Carry me this message
To a few of my friends:
Tell them to forget me
Most of the time,
That I’ll be far away
On some business of my own.
But on all clear windy mornings
Tell them I’ll be there
In the sunlight,
Flickering around;
And sometimes,
When the water ripples soft
Against the land,
And the afternoon
Is one of those quiet hazy ones,
I’ll be near by,
Making them think about me
Then.

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