Samuel Minturn Peck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Minturn_Peck

Samuel Minturn Peck (November 4, 1854 – May 3, 1938) was an American poet, named first poet laureate of the state of Alabama.

Biography

Samuel Minturn Peck was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on November 4, 1854, the youngest of nine children of Elisha Wolsey Peck and Lucy Lamb Randall. In 1865, the family moved to Illinois before returning to Tuscaloosa two years later, where his father became a justice for the state Supreme Court. Peck earned a master's degree from the University of Alabama in 1871 and went on to get a medical degree in 1879 from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in order to please his parents, despite his literary ambitions.

It was while he was a medical student that, in 1878, he published his first poem, "The Orange Tree", in the New York Post. His first book, Cap and Bells, was published in 1886. His father died two years later and, with his inheritance, he traveled to Europe. He published several more books of verse, earning him a reputation as an unpretentious author of vers de société. In 1930, he was given the honorary position of Poet Laureate of Alabama, the first to hold the title, which he held until his death in 1938. The title was made specifically in his honor and was not again filled until 1954.

Peck died May 3, 1938.

Poetic style and response

Peck was known as a simple, unchallenging writer with easy to understand poems that flowed easily. Between 1886 and 1925, he published seven volumes of poetry in addition to various poems published in newspapers like the Boston Transcript. Among his most famous poems is "The Grapevine Swing" (1892), which was frequently recited by schoolchildren. Upon the publication of his second book, one critic praised his "light verse, admirably written" and his "simple melodies" that were "rhythmically smooth". Many of his poems were set to music by a variety of composers including Thomas G. Shepard. See IMSLP for some examples.

As Peck himself noted, "In the making of my verses I have striven for simplicity, grace, and beauty. I have felt that sublimity was beyond my power to achieve."[6] Peck showed an obvious dislike of less traditional poetic forms and privately noted his dislike for more Avant Garde poets including Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Harriet Monroe, and fellow Alabama writer Clement Wood, whom he satirized in his poem "The Poet and the Pixie". After the turn of the century, even Peck admitted he had become "somewhat passé".

Less often, Peck experimented with writing prose. In the 1890s, he attempted to replicate the success of local color stories by writers like Mary Noailles Murfree, Thomas Nelson Page, and Joel Chandler Harris, and published 25 such works in Alabama Sketches (1902). During interviews in his later years, he rarely referred to his attempts at prose and considered himself first and foremost a poet. At his death, however, he left behind four unfinished novels.[9] A Birmingham, Alabama newspaper reported on his death by noting, "Peck was not a great poet. But he was a wholesome influence upon Alabama letters."

Published works

Cap and Bells (1886)

Rings and Love-Knots (1892)

Rhymes and Roses (1895)

Fair Women of Today (1895)

The Golf Girl (1899)

Alabama Sketches (1902)

Maybloom and Myrtle (1910)

The Autumn Trail (1925)

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Samuel Minturn Peck (1854-1938) was Alabama's first poet laureate. He published seven collections of poetry and a volume of prose short stories. Although his work gained some popularity, he was never acclaimed by critics. The importance of his poems and other literary endeavors remains of historical interest.

Peck was born in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, on November 4, 1854, to Elisha Wolsey and Lucy Lamb Peck. His father was a New Yorker who came to Alabama in 1824 to practice law. The family lived briefly in Illinois from 1865 to 1867 and then returned to Tuscaloosa, when Elisha Peck became Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court under the Reconstruction government. Samuel Peck enrolled in the University of Alabama in 1871 and graduated with a master's degree in 1876.

Although his main interest was literature, he entered Bellevue Hospital Medical School in New York to please his parents. During his medical studies, Peck published his first poem in the New York Evening Post. In 1879, Peck received his medical degree and, having satisfied his parents, Peck was free to pursue a career in literature. He studied languages and literature at Columbia University and published poems in several newspapers and magazines, including the Youth's Companion, Century, and the Independent.

In 1886, the New York publishing house of White, Stokes, and Allen published Peck's first volume of poetry, Cap and Bells, to great success; the book went through five editions. The 86 poems in the volume demonstrate his technical facility in the genre of light verse, or vers de société.

When his father died in 1888, Samuel Peck inherited a sizeable fortune and decided to travel abroad and study. He took courses at the Alliance Française in Paris and in 1895 toured France by bicycle. He made six trips to Europe between 1895 and 1914 and was fortunate to book passage back to the United States before the outbreak of World War I. During these years, he continued to publish, producing several volumes of poetry, including Rings and Love Knots (1892), Rhymes and Roses (1895), and Maybloom and Myrtle (1910). Several of his poems, most notably "The Grapevine Swing," explore rural themes that Peck experienced during his upbringing. That poem and several others were set to music as performance pieces. He also produced a volume of short stories, Alabama Sketches (1902), in which he attempted to join the already-fading "local color" genre of southern literature. Several of the sketches were set in the fictional town of Oakville, which was modelled on Tuscaloosa. Peck's last book of poems, Autumn Trail, was published in 1925. Samuel Minturn Peck lived out his last years in Tuscaloosa, and in 1931, after the Alabama Writers Conclave successfully lobbied the state to create the honorary position of state Poet Laureate, Peck was selected to hold that title. Samuel Minturn Peck died in Tuscaloosa on May 3, 1938.