Famous Single Poems
to consider an ample and satisfying explanation—as, indeed, it was!
William Allen Silloway insisted that he had published the poem in a New England paper (name not given) four years prior to its appearance in Harper’s Weekly, but the files had unfortunately been destroyed. He had been inspired to its composition through the degradation of his wife, “a niece of Millard Fillmore,” who had fallen a victim to the Demon Rum, and who had been found dead by a policeman in a snowdrift in Leonard street, New York City, in the winter of 1854. This catastrophe had so worked upon him that, for the first time in his life, he had broken into verse—the verse in question being “Beautiful Snow.” This story he seemed to regard as proving conclusively that he wrote the poem.
It is the hard fate of anthologists that they have to decide such controversies as this, and when William Cullen Bryant was compiling his Library of Poetry and Song, he assembled all the evidence and decided in favor of Mr. Watson. There has never been any serious reason to question his verdict.
John Whitaker Watson was a prolific writer, a hack of Grub Street, but “Beautiful Snow” is the only thing of his that still lives—if it can be said to live. He was born in New York City
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