A History of Poets' Reception of Mark Twain, 1863-1936

Book excerpt: This collection of poetry about Mark Twain explores a neglected dimension in his critical and popular reception during a period of over seventy years. The three hundred and fifty published ballads, sonnets, limericks, lyrics, couplets, and quatrains, including some in dialect, run the gamut from the banal and piquant to the eloquent, from rhymes by anonymous poetasters to highbrow tributes. Organized chronologically by topic, the sections also indicate the frequency with which the poems were reprinted and the venues in which they appeared. Though they were pitched to entertain general readers, this gathering should also prove useful to teachers and scholars of American literature. In all, they trace the crests in Twain’s fame and contemporary popular reputation over the decades and silhouette his pervasive presence in literary circles around the world during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.