| Two days ago, I shared Charles Dickinson’s poem “The Children,” along with this quote from a Wikipedia article on Dickinson: “Hezekiah Butterworth called (“The Children”) the second most popular American poem and Rossiter Johnson ranked as one of the world's most famous poems.” Yesterday I reported on Hezekiah Butterworth and my speculation as to the “first most American poem”; today, I have info on Rossiter Johnson. Rossiter Johnson (1840 – 1931) was an American author and editor. He edited several encyclopedias, dictionaries, and books, and was one of the first editors to publish "pocket" editions of the classics. He was also an author of histories, novels, and poetry. Among his best-known works was Phaeton Rogers, a novel of boyhood in Rochester, New York, where Johnson was born (and by the way, he shares my birthday of October 3rd). |  |
As an aside, some of my posts in late December discussed the poetry of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Aldrich also wrote The Story of a Bad Boy, a serialized story in 1869 in Our Young Folks magazine and then published as a book in 1870. The Story of a Bad Boy is often cited as the work which established the "bad boy” subgenre in nineteenth-century American literature laying the groundwork for Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, and other similarly themed novels, like Rossiter’s Phaeton Rogers, published in 1881.
| As I was exploring Johnson and his works, I read some of his poems, and – to quote a line that popped into my head from an episode of the sit-com “Frasier” (when Martin appeared on “Antiques Roadshow” with a clock set in the stomach of a pewter statue of a bear) – the results were “pretty much what I figured. Below are two poems, one by Johnson, "A Soldier Poet," and another by Dickinson, "This World is not Conclusion." The last four lines of Johnson's work called to mind the opening four lines of Dickinson’s. |  |
 |  |
Dickinson’s poem, though, is much more powerful and profound with its look at the tension between human thought of an afterlife and the persistent doubt that arises from the inability to prove it.
I suspect it comes as no surprise that I prefer Dickinson’s poem over Rossiter’s, or – from recent posts – Dickinson’s over Butterworth’s, Dickinson’s over (Charles) Dickinson’s, or Dickinson’s over Aldrich’s. My wife told me I’m being unfair because I’m not comparing apples to apples, so to speak. She said it’s not like I’m comparing works by Beethoven to works of Brahms or Bach. No, she said that comparing works of unknown 19th century poets to Dickinson was, in essence, like comparing musical works of Frantisek Kotzwara to Beethoven.
I plead the Fifth. #badumpbump
I suspect it comes as no surprise that I prefer Dickinson’s poem over Rossiter’s, or – from recent posts – Dickinson’s over Butterworth’s, Dickinson’s over (Charles) Dickinson’s, or Dickinson’s over Aldrich’s. My wife told me I’m being unfair because I’m not comparing apples to apples, so to speak. She said it’s not like I’m comparing works by Beethoven to works of Brahms or Bach. No, she said that comparing works of unknown 19th century poets to Dickinson was, in essence, like comparing musical works of Frantisek Kotzwara to Beethoven.
I plead the Fifth. #badumpbump
RSS Feed
