Through the Eyes of a Poet: The Life and Writings of Kate Fort Codington

Her life was a triumphant one that lacked only eight years of a full century. When she was eight-five, she climbed from the road to the highest peak in North Carolina. On her ninetieth birthday, her six children replaced her worn piano with a more tuneful one on which she could play the thunderous Beethoven sonatas she loved. And only one week before her death, copies of her third book of poems, "The Ark of the Everglades" arrived from the printer.

Kate Fort Codington was a gracious lady of old-line Atlanta society whose roots were deeply embedded in the Victorian concept of dignity and decorum that characterized the aristocratic "Old South." (She would, for instance, never serve at a table that was not daintily set, or drink tea from anything but fine china.) However Kate Codington was a universal and totally free soul, offering no allegiance to custom or circumstance, she ranged the farthest reaches of human imagination.

Using her poems and short stories, and a few memoirs of friends and family, her granddaughter has narrated the width and breadth of the life of this amazing woman, and the century in which she lived.