The American sonnet before the Civil War is not a rich field. Few of our literary men had written in this difficult and conventional form. Some, like James Gates Percival and William G. Simms, wrote poems of fourteen lines in such eccentric variations as to defy classification. A few, like Jones Very or Park Benjamin, hid an occasional fine sonnet among numerous negligible ones. Some, like David Humphreys and Washington Allston, achieved mere mixed echoes of English originals. Among the major poets before the War, Bryant wrote five and Lowell twenty-seven sonnets. Longfellow, whose great period of sonnet writing was yet to come, had written but nine sonnets in 1861. Compared with these poets, George Henry Boker stands alone, both for the quality and quantity of his work. By his contemporaries he was regarded as the greatest American sonnet writer. The Book of the Sonnet,1 a collection of American and English Sonnets, edited by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee, is dedicated to Boker. Both in the text and introduction he is given more space than any other American. The editors' phrase, “such sonnets as those of Wordsworth in English and George Henry Boker in American literature” indicates the height of his contemporary reputation. The Philadelphia Press, December 22, 1881, tells the story of Boker's confusion, when as a young man, he attended a dinner addressed by Daniel Webster, who, in the midst of his discourse, acknowledged Boker's presence and recited his beautiful “Lear and Cordelia” from start to finish, to illustrate a point.
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