What My Lover Said
collaboration and of her general friendly intimacy with Homer Greene.
“Up to that time,” adds Mr. Greene, “I had never heard of Mrs. Safford, but I afterwards learned that she had done considerable journalistic and some literary work. A little later, Barton Hill, the actor, was my guest over-night, and he told me about his friendship with Mrs. Safford, and about their mutual fondness for the poem, but he said that Mrs. Safford had never claimed to him any part in its composition.”
So perhaps the Boston man was mistaken, in spite of his circumstantial story.
“Barton Hill recited the poem to me that evening,” Mr. Greene continues, “and he did it exquisitely. Later on, Kathryn Kidder (now Mrs. Louis K. Anspacher) recited the poem one evening to a little company of us at the house of a mutual friend in New York. She did it only indifferently well, and she told me afterward that the presence of the author had given her such an attack of stage fright that she simply went to pieces. And she a seasoned actress!
“I might add that the controversy over the authorship of the poem has not yet ended, and perhaps never will. The verses not infrequently appear, even now, accredited to some other known or unknown writer.”
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