Sherry Chandler » George D. Prentice
George D. Prentice
George D. Prentice was something of a prodigy. Born in Connecticut in 1802, according to John James Piatt in the “Biographical Sketch” introducing his collection of The Poems of George D. Prentice, he could read chapters from the Bible by the age of three-and-a-half. His father being poor, he was kept out of school to do farm work from ages 9-14, but then with the help of a private tutor, managed to do his college prep in about six months time. He could easily memorize whole swaths of Vergil, Horace, Cicero, the Greek New Testament, and Homer. But he still did not have the means to go to college, so at 15 he became a village schoolmaster. In 1820, not quite 18, he entered Brown as a sophomore.
He graduated Brown in 1823, studied law and was admitted to the bar. But he preferred journalism, so in 1827 he started The New England Review. He became very influential in politics and in 1830, he turned the Review over to John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poems he had published, and travelled to Kentucky to write a campaign biography of Henry Clay. Prentice was a great fan of Clay; his elegy for The Great Compromiser begins like this:
With voice and mien of stern control,
He stood among the great and proud,
And words of fire burst from his soul
Like lightnings from the tempest cloud…
If Piatt is to be believed, Prentice stayed in Kentucky and established The Louisville Journal primarily to campaign for Clay. The newspaper went on to become the foremost Whig newspaper in the country. His editorial writing was known, to quote Piatt, by “its peculiar, short, sharp, epigrammatic paragraphs, which, as a general thing, flew to their mark like arrows…” For the most part, Prentice seemed to stay on genial personal relations with his opposing editors, and Piatt makes much of the fact that he did not duel, but he was once shot by a Kentucky editor named Trotter.
Although Prentice fought to keep Kentucky in the Union and, in fact, served in the home guard to keep the Rebels out of Louisville, both his sons joined the Confederate Army and his elder son, with Morgan’s Raiders, was killed in battle at Augusta, Kentucky. Prentice himself died in January 1870.
Prentice’s aphorisms are little jewels but his poetry tends toward sentimentality and bombast. “The Closing Year” is most often anthologized, but I liked this little love poem (though it does turn a bit sinister and Last-Duchess in the final stanza):
Sent with a Rose
Oh, take my rose — ‘t is a lovely flower,
And ‘t was plucked in the morning’s earliest hour,
When a dew-drop lay at its heart of pearl
Like a dream in the breast of a sleeping girl.
Oh, press my rose, at thy own sweet home,
Between the leaves of thy favorite tome;
Then keep it ever, for it will be
A token of love from my heart to thee.
There’s a rose, dear lady, upon thy cheek,
Oh, fairer and brighter than words can speak;
But treasure this precept within thy breast,
By none, save me, must that rose be prest.
— George D. Prentice, The Poems of George D. Prentice (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co, 1876)
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1 Comment
1. Sherry Chandler » G&hellip replies at 31st December 2006, 12:07 pm :
[...] Both of Prentice’s sons fought for the South. One died campaigning with John Hunt Morgan, the other, if I remember correctly, was never reconciled with his father. Prentice the polemicist was also Prentice the poet and patron of poets. I have written about him here. The poem below, appropriate to the day, is his most famous. [...]
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