Famous Single Poems
like Eugene Field's "Sharps and Flats" in the Chicago Record. It was bad; but Valentine every once in a while would hand me a bit of verse which I would run, he signing it "February 14," being St. Valentine's day, as 'twere.
Valentine and I were roommates. My brother Walter sent me a set of Macaulay's works and one Sunday evening, reading "Horatius at the Bridge," I said to Valentine that here was a good opportunity to parody "Horatius" by a poem about a Mick at the Bat. We were then baseball crazy. Valentine read the Macaulay poem and went ahead and wrote a piece he called "Casey at the Bat."
It is rather curious that all the claimants for this poem have been seemingly unaware that "Casey at the Bat" is a parody on "Horatius at the Bridge," with the same meter and the end of each stanza very nearly the same.
I left Sioux City in 1887 and never heard of Valentine or thought anything of his poem until one night I met him on lower Broadway in 1898. I was then press agent at the Broadway Theatre and Valentine was employed on the New York World. He promised to come to see me at the Broadway Theatre. About the first thing he mentioned to me at this meeting was that De Wolf Hopper, who was reciting his poem "Casey at the Bat," was giving credit for its authorship to a man named Thayer. He asked me if I didn't recall the fact that I had suggested "Casey at the Bat" to him in consequence of reading "Horatius at the Bridge." I told him that I did recall it, but that I had forgotten all
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