She began to write poetry at an early age and when she was 16 became a
protégée of
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. With his encouragement, she had her early poems published in periodicals such as
The English Review, the ''
Englishwoman's Review, Country Life, The Nation, The Spectator and the Pall Mall Gazette. She published her first book of poems, Floral Symphony
, in 1900. In 1910, she edited A Book of Verse by Living Women''. In her introduction, she noted that poetry was one of the few arts in which women were allowed to engage without opposition and made a direct connection between women's social freedom and the freedom of the imagination. When the
Poetry Society was formed in 1912, Sackville was made its first president. She had also been the first president of its predecessor, the Poetry Recital Society, formed in 1909. Joy Grant, in her biography of
Harold Monro, writes that Sackville "spoke well and to the point at the inauguration, hoping that the Society would 'never become facile and "popular", to turn to a merely trivial gathering of persons amiably interested in the same ideal'". Her half-expressed fears were unfortunately fulfilled: "the direction in which the Society was heading soon became obvious—poetry was made an excuse for pleasant social exchanges, for irrelevant snobbery, for the disagreeable consequences of organised association." ==Personal life==