TWA Poet: Katharine Lee Bates

1859-1929

It's the birthday of the woman who wrote the lines: "O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!" That's Katharine Lee Bates, born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod (1859).

Bates graduated from Wellesley College, then became an English professor there. She spent the summer o…