Wood, Charles Erskine Scott

Wood, Charles Erskine Scott (1852–1944), born in Pennsylvania, after an army career in the West became an Oregon lawyer (1884–1919) and published his first poetry in A Masque of Love (1904), followed by The Poet in the Desert (1915), a dialogue between Truth and a Poet, protesting against social injustice and championing humanitarian ideals. Later poetry appears in Maia (1918), a sonnet sequence, and Poems from the Ranges (1929). Colonel Wood, who long lived in California, is best known for Heavenly Discourse (1927), a series of 40 dialogues written during World War I for The Masses, although only a few were published before the magazine was suppressed. Satirizing the folly and inhumanity of the war, as well as other manifestations of meanness, irreligion, economic inequality, sentimental art, Puritanism, political abuses, and persecution, these ironically humorous conversations take place in Heaven among God, Satan, Jesus, and such angels or temporary visitors as Rabelais, Voltaire, Paine, Clemens, Jefferson, Carry Nation, Bryan, Billy Sunday, Ingersoll, Joan of Arc, Anthony Comstock, and Charles Evans Hughes. A 41st dialogue on Sacco and Vanzetti was added in 1928. A second collection, Earthly Discourse, was published in 1937.