Rock Me to Sleep
were further infuriated when “Rock Me to Sleep” was included in a volume of poems published for Mrs. Akers by Ticknor & Fields in 1866. The controversy raged in the public prints with a violence possible only in those days of smashing epithets and whole-hearted vituperation. The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Providence Journal, the New York Times, the Round Table, the New York Tribune, the Knickerbocker Magazine, and countless others, took a hand—or, rather, a fist—in it, gave and received lusty blows, and had a gorgeous time. How deeply all this excoriated Mrs. Akers may be judged from a letter she wrote Mr. Ball in August, 1867.
“Of the utter falsity of the claim,” she says to him, “which you have made to the poem, ‘Rock Me to Sleep,’ no two persons in the world can be so well aware as you and myself. You know that it is not yours; that you never saw it until you saw it in print. I know that it is mine, and mine only. Furthermore, you and I both know that your sin in this thing was not ‘involuntary’ or ‘clairvoyant.’ You have clearly proved, by parading before the world your so-called ‘original draft’ of this poem, that this claim of yours was a deliberately planned and coolly executed piece of villainy. So far as your influence reaches and convinces, I stand before the world guilty of falsehood and theft,
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