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Thursday, April 23, 2020

Making 'The Dream' Come True

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.” – Edwin Markham

 Markham, born on this date in 1852, lived one of those remarkable “achieving the American Dream” lives.  Born the last of 10 kids and growing up in a broken home (his parents divorced shortly after his birth), he worked the family farm as a child, was mostly self-educated and against the wishes of his family decided to go to college and study literature.

After teaching for several years (he had a two-year degree from a “Normal” school), he earned his bachelor’s and master’s in the Classics, fell in love with poetry and began writing in his late 40s.  His two most famous poems are "The Man with the Hoe," inspired by a painting by the French artist Millet, and "Lincoln, the Man of the People," read at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.  The president of Princeton University called it “The greatest poem ever written on the immortal martyr, and the greatest that ever will be written."
 
 
 Edwin Markham                             Millet’s ‘The Man With The Hoe’
An amazing letter writer and book collector, Markham amassed 15,000+ books.  He bequeathed them and his personal papers and letters, including years of correspondence with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, and fellow poets Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell, to tiny Wagner College in New York City at the time of his death in 1940.  Poet Laureate of Oregon in the 1930s, he was the first recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award in 1937. 

“Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream," he wrote,  "but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!”

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