At seventeen, William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was already at work on the poem we all used to know, from our old high-school American-literature textbooks, as “Thanatopsis.” We know this poem as ...

The years have not been kind to Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919). A prolific writer of verse, she had excellent sales of her poetry collections in the late 19th century. But as you might guess from, ...