Famous Single Poems
But to this his friends would by no means agree. Without consulting him they wrote indignant letters to the papers denouncing “Florence Percy” as a shameless plagiarist, and asserting that “Rock Me to Sleep” had been written by Alexander M. W. Ball. This finally drew a tart letter from Elizabeth A. C. Akers, published in the New York Evening Post for June 13, 1865, in which she stated that she had written “Rock Me to Sleep” in May, 1860, while sojourning in Italy, and had sent it to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, which had published it shortly after its receipt. She had signed it “Florence Percy,” a pen-name which she had “mistakenly adopted when a girl.”
“I am certainly one of the last individuals in the world,” Mrs. Akers continued, “to take the humiliating position of contending in public or otherwise for a matter of literary credit; and so long as this question was merely that of ability to write the poem in dispute it was simply amusing to me.
“But when it assumes, as it has latterly done, the attitude of a slander, liable to set me wrong in the opinion of many whose regard is dearer to me than any newspaper praise could be, when I hear myself good-naturedly designated in society as the lady who pretends to have written, etc., it is high time to state the facts.”
This letter unleashed the dogs of war, which
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