Hovey, Richard

Hovey, Richard (1864–1900), born in Illinois, early began to write poetry and published his first small volume at the age of 16. After graduating from Dartmouth (1885), he was successively an art student, theological student, journalist, actor, and lecturer. He was in England and France (1891–92), and, influenced by the French Symbolists, translated eight of Maeterlinck's plays. His own poetic vitality found an outlet in the exuberant Songs from Vagabondia (1894), written in collaboration with Bliss Carman. In this and the later volumes written with Carman, More Songs from Vagabondia (1896) and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1901), he reveled in the idea of the open road and happily proclaimed the joys of youthful living and companionship. The outbreak of the Spanish‐American War swept him into an excited chauvinism, and in such poems as Unmanifest Destiny and The Word of the Lord from Havana he nationalized the Deity and deified the nation. With these poems, which appeared in Along the Trail (1898), was published his longer poem, Spring, whose popular interlude, A Stein Song, has the refrain,For it's always fair weather
When good fellows get together …
During these years, Hovey was also writing an ambitious cycle of poetic dramas based on the Morte d'Arthur, with love as a central theme and the thesis that the social system has not yet evolved sufficiently to become “a medium in which all lives can move at all times in all respects in freedom.” He projected three trilogies, each consisting of a masque, a tragedy, and a drama, but in the posthumous collection of fragments The Holy Graal (1907) are only the first trilogy and the masque of the second. During the last two years of his life, he lectured at Barnard College. To the End of the Trail (1908) is a posthumous collection of poems.