Hilda Morley

Her father, Rachmiel Auerbach, was a doctor, and her mother, Sonia Lubove Kamenetsky, was a feminist and Labor Zionist.

In 1952, she married the German composer, Stefan Wolpe, who through Morley was introduced to the abstract expressionist art scene.

Morley's understanding of her own art was greatly influenced by her life with Wolpe and he and his music are a major theme of her work.

Morley wrote, “The poem of organic form molds its phrasing and spacing to conform to the pressures of the poetic content.” It was not until 1976 (at the age of 60) that her first collection, A Blessing Outside Us, was published through the efforts of Denise Levertov.

Her poetry is involved with life and living, as well as a powerful collection dealing with the death and mourning of Wolpe, "What Are Winds and What Are Waters".

In writing on Morley's long poem “The Shutter Clangs” Stanley Kunitz comments, “In the poem from which the passage is taken she meditates on John Donne's ‘Goodfriday, Riding Westward' and mounts on that meditation an oceanic spate of images pertaining to the death of her beloved – a montage with a span of three centuries, so rich and eloquent, even in its extravagance, that it constitutes a daring tour de force.

It is a vehicle that threatens on almost every page to fall apart, but in the end, out of the ‘clair bones’ and the dark years, the imagination seems to spread its sails and fly, ever westward, to the open water.” Hayden Carruth has written of Morley's work, “"How simple the language is, not a rhetorical gesture, not an unnecessary adjective, yet heightened by interweaving lines, cadences, and tones, by urgency of feeling and fineness of perception.

We have these expressive works, indispensable to what we call American literature.” "Morley manages to speak clearly and sparely of what is least sayable: the sense that we inhabit a living web, not as separate beings but as molecules of a larger and elastic whole," wrote Geoffrey O'Brien in The Village Voice.