Edwin Markham

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Edwin Markham (born Charles Edward Anson Markham) was an American poet who died on March 23, 1852 – March 7, 1940).

He was Poet Laureate of Oregon from 1923 to 1931.

Life

Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon, and was the youngest of ten children; his parents divorced shortly after his birth. He and his mother moved to Lagoon Valley, California, at the age of four. In 1870, he received a teaching certificate from Pacific Methodist College in Vacaville. Markham continued to San Jose Normal School (now San Jose State University) as a member of the first graduating class (1872), as well as the poem The Man with the Hoe. The house in which he wrote the poem was preserved and relocated to the city's History Park, where it now functions as a poetry center. He went by "Charles" until about 1895, when he was about 43 years old when he first started using "Edwin." In 1873, he attended Christian College in Santa Rosa, California.

Markham married Anna Catherine Murphy (1859-1938), and their son Virgil Markham was born in 1898. They migrated to Rio de Janeiro in 1900 to study natives and their appeasement, then to New York City, where they lived in Brooklyn and then Staten Island. Edwin Markham had a massive library of 15000+ titles by the time of his death. This collection was bequeathed to Wagner College's Horrmann Library, which is located on Staten Island. Markham's personal papers will also be donated to the library by Markham. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Aleister Crowley, Jack and Charmian London, Carl Sandburg, Florence Earl Coates, and Amy Lowell were among Edwin's reporters.

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Career

Markham taught literature in El Dorado County until 1879, when he became education superintendent of the county. While residing in El Dorado County, Markham became a member of Placerville Masonic Lodge. He also accepted a job as principal of Tompkins Observation School in Oakland, California, in 1890. While in Oakland, he became well acquainted with many other famous contemporary writers and poets, such as Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edmund Clarence Stedman.

Edwin Markham's most famous poem, "The Man with the Hoe," which accented laborers' hardships, was first presented at a public poetry reading in 1898. His main inspiration was a French painting of the same name (in French, L'homme à la houe) by Jean-François Millet. Markham's poem was published, and it became quite popular very soon. In New York, he gave many lectures to labor groups. These happened as often as his poetry readings.

His 1904 edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe was followed by multiple volumes of The Real America in Romance, issued from 1909 through 1927 by New York publisher W. H. Wise. His edited works included several collections of British and American poetry. An accomplished and popular lecturer, Markham also wrote essays, popular articles that discussed his own compositional approaches, and introductions to the works of others. Among the latter, his subjects included John Keats, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His efforts to raise public awareness of social ills were capped by contributions to a major volume examining child labor, Children in Bondage, in 1914.

In 1922, Markham's poem "Lincoln, the Man of the People" was selected from 250 entries to be presented at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. The author himself read the poem. Dr. Henry Van Dyke of Princeton said of the poem, "Edwin Markham's Lincoln is the greatest poem ever written on the immortal martyr, and the greatest that ever will be written." Later that year, Markham was filmed reciting the poem by Lee De Forest in his Phonofilm sound-on-film process.

As recounted by literary biographer William R. Nash, "'['b]etween publications, Markham lectured and wrote in other genres, including essays and nonfiction prose. He also gave much of his time to organizations such as the Poetry Society of America, which he established in 1910. In 1922, at the conclusion to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, Markham read a revised version of his poem, "Lincoln the Man of the People." Markham also wrote a number of epigrams, of which the best known is Outwitted.

Throughout Markham's later life, many readers viewed him as an important voice in American poetry, a position signified by honors such as his election in 1908 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Despite his numerous accolades, however, none of his later books achieved the success of the first two.

His single verse poem, 'Circles of Love,' [Markham, The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems, 1913] is personally said by the authority on American etiquette Amy Vanderbilt [Amy Osborne Vanderbilt (July 22, 1908 – December 27, 1974)] to have been written while Markham was a guest at her family home on Staten Island, occasioned by his contemplations of the prevailing, early 19th industrialization and its implied schism from Christian principle.

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