Now That's What I Call Poetry! Vol. 1
For National Poetry Month, we're spotlighting Oregon's Poet Laureates. This week, take a moment to explore the work of the poets who told our story between 1923 and 1965.
For more information about the Poet Laureate program, visit the Library of Congress or the Oregon Cultural Trust. Poetry by all featured poets can be found in From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry, available at the Library.
For more information about the Poet Laureate program, visit the Library of Congress or the Oregon Cultural Trust. Poetry by all featured poets can be found in From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry, available at the Library.
Edwin Markham, 1923 - 1931
Edwin Markham was a spiritualist and social progressive who was most famous for his poem of the working class, "The Man With the Hoe." I prefer his nature writing, though, like his poem "In Death Valley" from his collection The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1921).
In Death Valley
There came gray stretches of volcanic plains,
Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill
Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw.
Around were heaps of ruins piled between
The Burn o’ Sorrow and the Water o’ Care;
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon.
There was a nameless Presence everywhere;
In the gray soil there was a purple stain,
And the gray reticent rocks were dyed with blood—
Blood of a vast unknown Calamity.
It was the mark of some ancestral grief—
Grief that began before the ancient Flood.
This poem is in the public domain.
More About Edwin Markham
- Edwin Markham at The Oregon Encyclopedia
- Poems by Edwin Markham at The Poetry Foundation
- Poems about Edwin Markham from LitFinder: "To Edwin Markham" by Ruth Le Prade and "Edwin Markham" by Marianne Clark
Ben Hur Lampman, 1951 - 1954
Ben Hur Lampman was a newspaper man who is, oddly enough, better remembered for his prose than for his poetry. The Oregonian recently reprinted Lampman's beloved essay "Where to Bury a Dog," an essay that went viral when it was published in 1925. The best bit? The essay is written in response to a reader's question published in the Ontario Argus Observer.
More About Ben Hur Lampman
Ethel Romig Fuller, 1957 - 1965
Ethel Romig Fuller celebrated the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and mentored her fellow poets. Her most widely circulated work, according to The Oregon Encyclopedia, was her poem "Proof," but my favorite is "Who Knows a Mountain?" from her collection White Peaks and Green, 1933.
Who Knows a Mountain?
Who knows a mountain?
One who has gone
To worship its beauty
In the dawn;
One who has slept
On its breast at night;
One who has measured
His strength to its height;
One who has followed
Its longest trail,
And laughed in the face
Of its fiercest gale;
One who has scaled its peaks,
And has trod
Its cloud-swept summits
Alone with God.
The poem is in the public domain.
More About Ethel Romig Fuller
More About Ethel Romig Fuller
- Ethel Romig Fuller at The Oregon Encyclopedia
- Poems by Ethel Romig Fuller at Oregon Poetic Voices and The Poetry Foundation
Read the rest of the series!
- Now That's What I Call Poetry! Vol. 2
- Now That's What I Call Poetry! Vol. 3
- Now That's What I Call Poetry! Vol. 4
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