Stoddard, Richard Henry

Stoddard, Richard Henry (1825–1903),born in Massachusetts, was reared in squalid surroundings there and in New York City, and educated himself while working as an iron molder. He published a volume of romantic Poems (1852), and through Hawthorne's aid obtained a position as inspector of customs in New York (1853–70). After occupying other political posts, he became the literary editor of the New York Mail and Express (1880–1903), having during the previous 20 years written reviews for the New York World. His poetry, published in such volumes as Songs of Summer (1857), Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode (1865), Poems (1880), and The Lion's Cub, and Other Poems (1890), was greatly admired in his day, but has come to be considered artificial, sentimental, and lacking in force, despite his gifts of melody and imagery. After 1870 Stoddard and his wife held a salon that was considered a center of New York literary life, and included not only such prominent contemporaries as Bayard Taylor and E.C. Stedman, but lesser‐known figures like Melville, whom he befriended. During the last quarter of the century, Stoddard was a literary arbiter of the U.S., through both his newspaper criticisms and his editorial work, which included an edition of Poe (1894), with a complacent memoir attacking the character of this acquaintance of his youth. His autobiography, Recollections Personal and Literary, was published in 1903.

Elizabeth Drew [Barstow] Stoddard (1823–1902), his wife, in addition to their collaborations, wrote The Morgesons (1862), Two Men (1865), and Temple House (1867), realistic novels set in her native Massachusetts. Although praised by Hawthorne, these were considered too grim for the average reader because of their truthful use of local color, anticipating Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary W. Freeman. Her Poems (1895) display poor technique, but have an intense, sometimes morbid, quality of personal revelation.