CHAPTER 27
Minor Poets from 1850 to 1900
… many poets, worthy of eternal remembrance, have been forgotten, merely because there was not room in our memories for all… There never was an age so prolific of popular poetry as that in which we now live… Now, if this goes on for a hundred years longer, what a task will await poetical readers of 1919.
LORD JEFFREY.
In addition to the widely known 19th century poets who have been considered, there was during the second half of the century a small group of lesser poets, who should be included in any comprehensive survey of Oregon verse. At least a dozen of these had volumes published and some were the authors of several volumes. They failed, deservedly or otherwise, to win wide or permanent renown, and their books may now be found mostly in a few large public libraries or among private collections of Northwest Americana.
They occasionally produced some poems of genuine merit that deserve to be remembered, but their whole output averaged to no high standard imaginatively or in felicity of expression.
They are significant in our cultural history as showing that in between times of the important writers the creative yeast was all the while in ferment, that there were no long lulls in the fresh wind blowing for literature. Their poems, with a few exceptions, were published locally and usually at their own expense, but mainly in simpler and better format than was the rule after 1900 when there was more of them and when the home-town printer, feeling that the subject called for special treatment, had naive aberrations towards lavender and old lace effects, or ribbons and colored cords, or bright covers, or garnitures from his
