Sherry Chandler

Amelia B. Welby

Amelia Ball Coppuck Welby was born in Baltimore on February 3, 1819. She published her first poem in the Cambridge Chronicle when she was 12. She moved to Louisville with her family when she was 15, and began to contribute poems to The Louisville Journal, which according to William Ward in A Literary History of Kentucky:

…had been the medium for the original appearance of much of the best poetry of the west. For several years, [George D.] Prentice’s home was the center of literary life in Louisville. A man of unusual intellectual brilliance, he was for forty years (1830-1870) the stalwart editor of the Journal (merged with the Courier in 1868), where he lashed out at his adversaries with wit and cleverness in his editorials and was one of the forces that kept Kentucky in the Union during the Civil War. But Prentice also wrote sentimental, moralistic verse…and had a knack for attracting ladies with poetic aspirations, women whom he and his gracious and talented wife encouraged and whose verses he published in his Journal. Welby was one of his favorite “discoveries”…

Welby’s work was picked up by other editors and widely published throughout the south, and even some northern periodicals. She was noticed by Edgar Allen Poe (criticism reproduced at the link).and Rufus W. Griswold included her in his Female Poets of America in 1856. In 1838, she married Louisville businessman George Welby. In 1845, she published a collection Poems by Amelia. She died at 33 (1852) after the birth of her only child. (And that bald statement must hold a great drama but the story is untold in the sources I’ve consulted.)

Twilight at Sea

THE twilight hours, like birds, flew by
As lightly and as free,
Ten thousand stars were in the sky,
Ten thousand on the sea;
For every wave, with dimpled face,
That leaped upon the air,
Had caught a star in its embrace,
And held it trembling there.

Text from Poet’s Corner.

Other Welby quotations found here.

[Note: I find it odd that most of Ward's paragraph devoted to Welby is actually about Prentice and his gracious and talented but nameless wife. On the other hand, Prentice apparently does not merit his own entry in A Literary History.]

Possibly related posts:

Amelia Welby

Henrietta Benham Prentice

Joseph Seamon Cotter

George D. Prentice

Al Smith Fellowships 2008

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