Chapter Poetry, South and North of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

Peck's first volume, Cap and Bells, appeared in 1886. Stanton, on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution, published Songs of the Soil in 1894. Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916) published a first volume, Madrigals and Catches, in 1887. A Southern Flight (1906) was published in association with Clinton Scollard (1860-1932), whose earliest volume, Pictures in Song, had appeared in 1884. Both poets were natives of New York. Scollard was professor of English literature at Hamilton College (1889-1896) and Sherman was in the Faculty of Columbia University (1904-1916). Madison J. Cawein (1865-1914), a Kentuckian, published his first book of poems under the title, Bloom of the Berry, in 1887. The name of Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906), a negro, living in Ohio, may well be added to the list. His songs in dialect were widely read and sung.

There were many women who contributed to the current poetry of these years, of whom the more prominent, perhaps, are: Edith M. Thomas (1854-1925), whose first volume, A New Year's Masque and Other Poems, appeared in 1885; Helen Gray Cone (born 1859), professor of English literature in Hunter College, New York, who published her early poems under the title, Oberon and Puck, in 1885; Katharine Lee Bates (born, 1859), professor of English in Wellesley College, author of the hymn, America the Beautiful, which has attained the dignity of a national anthem; and Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) in whose verse the presence of a mystical element adds to its appeal.

William Dean Howells, Silas Weir Mitchell, George Edward Woodberry, and Henry van Dyke, although classified as prose writers, have all written occasional verse which merits more than passing recognition.