| Starting back in mid-December, HERE, I mentioned a list I’d found of American poets from the 19th century. Since then, I’ve selected various names at random to explore (Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Chales Dickinson, Hezekiah Butterworth, and Rossiter Johnson), and today I have another. The surprising thing with today’s entry: it’s a woman! Honestly, I was stunned that the list of poets numbered close to 800 names; more surprising, though, on the first page of about 200 names, a full sixty percent are women. In a day and age when women were discouraged from writing and publishing at all – or perhaps forced to publish under the name of a man – I was completely surprised to see so many women’s names. Chosen at random for today, I have Melissa Elizabeth Banta, who published under the pen name of M. E. Banta. Info on her on Wikipedia is HERE. |  |
Okay, this is weird, but the first thing that jumped out at me when I read up on Ms. Banta was the fact that she is buried in Greenlawn Cemetery (albeit in Indiana). As a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, I couldn’t help but think of that scene from “Psycho” when Sheriff Chambers says ominously to Sam and Lila, “Well, if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates... who's that woman buried out at Greenlawn Cemetery?” LOL.
| To be honest, I had difficulty finding poems written by M. E. Banta, and in my initial searches, I actually found a different Melissa Banta. Oddly enough, she too was an author, and she, too, was in a cemetery – though not buried in one. This modern-day Melissa Banta, along with Meg L. Winslow, wrote “The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery: Mount Auburn’s Significant Monument Collection.” In the pic I found, she was peering at the grave of 19th century actor Edwin Booth, brother to John Wilkes Booth. |  |
Oddly enough, on December 19th I shared Thomas Aldrich Bailey’s sonnet “At Stratford-Upon-Avon,” a poem which he had dedicated to Edwin Booth. This Booth is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown, MA. His brother is buried in an unmarked grave in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, MD; however, a simple headstone in the family plot is considered his spot, frequently visited and often covered in pennies left by visitors as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln.
 | Ultimately, I did uncover some poetry by M. E. Banta, a book published in 1895 called “Songs of Home” (HERE). The book includes one of her more celebrated poems, “The Gruesome Rain” (page 5), a somber recollection of the yellow fever epidemic in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1853. In addition to “The Gruesome Rain,” I also read “Midsummer” (page 24), “An Autumn Revery” (page 28), and – with its title a tribute to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem – “By the Shining Big Sea Water” (page 52). Banta’s poetry is fine – very lilting, very observational, chock full of sensory imagery; however, her works call to mind a line from an 1892 letter from W. I. Fletcher to Dickinson’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd. In his letter, Fletcher stated that “Dickinson wrote poetry which embalmed and interpreted the most insignificant things in nature,” and he compared her works to another well-known poet of the day, J. Whitcomb Riley, by noting that Riley’s work was “also poetry…but it merely helps us see the things without doing much to help us see into them” – that is, as Dickinson’s works do – we see into things. |
One funny image that struck my fancy in “By the Shining Big Sea Water” was this description of the ubiquitous hum of mosquitos in the swamp with its reference to the insect’s “thin, wee viol”:
Cold and hidden in the marshes,
Where mosquito’s thin, wee viol
Shrills all day, and shrills in darkness.
Also, just as an aside, I noticed that at the conclusion of each poem, the book includes odd little pencil drawings of thin, wee forest denizens. Some examples are shown below. LOL.
Cold and hidden in the marshes,
Where mosquito’s thin, wee viol
Shrills all day, and shrills in darkness.
Also, just as an aside, I noticed that at the conclusion of each poem, the book includes odd little pencil drawings of thin, wee forest denizens. Some examples are shown below. LOL.
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