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Richard Henry Stoddard
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Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
A Study of Poetry
4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Poetry: First Lines
Quick Facts
Born:
July 2, 1825, Hingham, Mass., U.S.
Died:
May 12, 1903, New York, N.Y. (aged 77)
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Richard Henry Stoddard

American critic and editor
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History

Richard Henry Stoddard (born July 2, 1825, Hingham, Mass., U.S.—died May 12, 1903, New York, N.Y.) was an American poet, critic, and editor, more important as a figure in New York literary circles in the late 19th century than for his own verse. Abraham Lincoln, An Horatian Ode (1865) and parts of Songs of Summer (1857) and The Book of the East (1867) can still be read with interest.

Stoddard spent most of his boyhood in New York City, where he became a blacksmith and later an iron molder, but in 1849 he gave up his trade and began writing for a living. He served as a literary reviewer and editor for a number of New York newspapers and magazines. His wife Elizabeth was a novelist and poet, and their house was a leading gathering place for writers and artists in the last 30 years of the 19th century. Stoddard’s autobiography, Recollections Personal and Literary, was published in 1903.

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