“We
have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.” –
Edwin Markham
Edwin Markham’s story is one of those remarkable
“American Dream” types. Born to a family
of 10 kids and growing up in a broken home (his parents divorced shortly after
his birth in 1852), 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.
Good idea.
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 most famous poem"The Man with the
Hoe," inspired by a painting by the French artist Millet, was first presented at a public
poetry reading in 1898. His poem "Lincoln,
the Man of the People" was selected from 250 entries to be read at the dedication
of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. 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 collector of books, Markham amassed a huge library of 15000+ books. He bequeathed them and his personal papers and
letters, which included 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 '30s, he was
the first recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award in 1937. Six schools and a World War II ship were
named in his honor after his death. Near
the end of his long life, he remarked, “Ah, great it is to believe the dream
as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life
through and say at the end, the dream is true!”
Here is a link to his poem about Lincoln:
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