Famous Single Poems
from the classic formulas of the eighteenth century—the Nymphs, the Muses, the Pierian Springs. How fresh and delightful it must have seemed!
William Dean Howells has told how he was entranced by it. At the time of its appearance in Harper’s Weekly in February, 1857, he was editing the Ohio State Journal at Columbus, and in an introduction to a collection of Mr. Butler’s poems published in 1899, he tells the story thus:
“In the year 1857,” he says, “prairie fires were still punctual with the falling year on the plains which farms and cities now hold against them; and when one said that this thing or that was sweeping the country like a prairie fire, every one else knew what one meant, and visualized the fact with quick intelligence. But if I say now that in 1857 a new poem, flashing from a novel impulse in our literature, and gay with lights and tints unknown before, swept the country like a prairie fire, how many, I wonder, will conceive of the astonishing success of ‘Nothing to Wear?’…
“But, after all, one must have lived in the year 1857, and been, say, in one’s twenty-first year, to have felt the full significance of its message and shared the joyful surprise of its amazing success. If to the enviable conditions suggested one joined the advantage of being a
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