Famous Single Poems
to trace the history of the poem, but had been unable to discover anything further.
A few days later, the Albany Evening Journal, in an editorial under the caption “H. G. and H. G.,” announced that it could give Mr. Hill the information he wanted, that “What My Lover Said” had been written in the fall of 1875 by Homer Greene, then a student at Union College, and that the fact that it had been signed only with his initials had caused it to be attributed to Greeley, the most famous “H. G.” in American history.
Both these articles were widely copied and warmly debated, and on December 8, 1880, fresh impetus was given the controversy by the appearance of the following letter in the Evening Post:
I have noticed that some discussion has arisen of late in the newspapers concerning the authorship of the poem"“What My Lover Said.” The New York correspondent of the Philadelphia Times writes that the poem was recited the other evening to a select company of actors and newspaper men by Mr. Barton Hill, who said that the poem was cut from the Evening Post some twenty-five years ago, and ascribed by that journal to Horace Greeley. Will the Evening Post kindly assist me now in an effort—it is certainly a laudable one—to do justice to Mr. Greeley’s memory by relieving it from such a burden of sentimentality, and allow me to confess,
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