Voltairine de Cleyre: Selected Poems and Essays

The radical poetry and essays of the pioneering feminist and anarchist philosopher Voltairine de Cleyre are collected in this small volume. Voltairine de Cleyre dedicated her life to freeing her fellow beings from the tyranny of an oppressive state. Raised in dire poverty, her father named her for the great French heretic Voltaire. Schooled in a convent, she became a lifelong atheist, feminist, and free thinker, championing at first individualist anarchism, and then finally Mutualism, or, as he termed it, "anarchy without adjectives." She is generally conceded to have been the greatest literary writer in anarchist circles. Plagued by ill-health her entire life, Voltairine de Cleyre succumbed to meningitis on June 20th, 1912, in Chicago, Illinois. She was 45 years old. She is interred next to the defendants of the Haymarket Riot, as well as fellow anarchist Emma Goldman.