In my recent posts, I’ve been sharing poems by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a long-past editor from “The Atlantic” who reviewed and panned early editions of Dickinson’s poetry. For the Belle of Amherst, he predicted “oblivion.”
| I suppose I’ve been a bit harsh with my reviews of his poems – they’re not bad – but they are certainly what I expected, outdated verse with grandiloquent, pretentious language. Aldrich, like many poets from the 19th century, suffered from what we in the industry call OVP, or Overambitious Versification Pathosis, sometimes referred to as “fancy pants syndrome.” Progress on controlling OVP among poets has been effective over the years, but the affliction has not been eradicated. Why, just this year, Pantone chose “white” as the Color of the Year for 2026, but they called it “Cloud Dancer.” Take a look at Aldrich’s poem “By the Potomac.” It’s a fine poem contrasting a scene of nature’s beauty to the horrors of what the country endured during the Civil War. It begins rather nicely with only subtle hints of OVP – the use of “o’er” and “crisp” ground-flowers; but then comes some “tangled gonfalons above our braves” – followed by full-on manifestation of OVP: “Hark,” “yon bower!” “Ah,” and “rivulet.” |  |
Now, let’s compare the work to a poem by Dickinson. I threw the word “grief” into the online archive and chose a work at random, “As imperceptibly as Grief.” It’s not about the “heavy heritage of grief” as the result of war, as in Aldrich’s poem, but its focus is on great loss, grief, and mortality. Oh, I suppose one could argue that some of the vocabulary does border on the overly-poetic, though I nonconcur (LOL – doesn’t that sound all fancy-pants).
 | I have to tell you, this poem took my breath away. That last stanza – and in particular that last line – left me awestruck. And did you notice the play on words in the penultimate line? I had to sit in silence after reading this poem to contemplate the images and message of dealing with loss and grief. I re-read the poem, twice. It’s beautiful. I’ll leave it at that today. I had one other poem by Aldrich to share, but I’ll save that for tomorrow. And get this – when I read this other poem, the one for tomorrow, my jaw dropped. |
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