Hovey

HOVEY, RICHARD (May 4, i864-Feb. 24,
1900), poet, third son of Maj.-Gen. Charles Ed-
ward Hovey [q.v.'] and Harriette Farnham
(Spofford) Hovey, was born in Normal, 111.
After the Civil War his parents made their home
in Washington, D. C, and Richard spent his
boyhood days in that city, passing some of his
vacations at North Andover in the old Spofford
place, then owned by his grandfather. He was
prepared for college at Hunt's School, Washing-
ton. At the age of sixteen he issued a small vol-
ume of verse; in the words of his mother, "He
learned to set the type, read the proof, printed,
bound the book, and copyrighted it before his
mother and father knew anything about it" (Re-
print, 1912, from Ninth Report, Dartmouth,
Class of 1885.) He entered Dartmouth in 1881,
where he was soon elected class poet. He won
several prizes for dramatic speaking, and in 1885
was graduated cwn laude in English language
and literature. At college he was editor of the
Dartmouth and the '85 &gis, and became a mem-
ber of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. Ever since his
undergraduate days he has been considered Dart-
mouth's laureate, and Dartmouth students still
sing "Men of Dartmouth." Of the poems writ-
ten at college, Prof. Boynton has said, "He wrote
for Dartmouth a body of tributary verse which
are as distinguished as are Holmes's Harvard
Poems. And he wrote for his college fraternity
songs and odes which are so distinguished as
wholly to transcend the occasions for which they
were prepared" (American Poetry, p. 689).

The year 1885-86 was spent by the poet in
Washington, studying drawing and painting in
the Art Students' League of that city. In 1886-
87 he was a student at the General Theological
Seminary of the Episcopal Church, at Chelsea
Square, New York; but after being for a short
while the lay assistant of Father Brown at the
Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, he gave up
the idea of taking Orders. The summer of 1887
he spent at Newton Center, Mass., where he met
Bliss Carman, the poet, and Tom Buford Mete-
yard, the artist. With Carman he was later to
collaborate in the Vagabondia books, and Mete-
yard was to make the designs. Through them
Hovey met Thomas William Parsons [#.#.], the
Dante scholar, on whose death he wrote the mag-
nificent elegy Seaward (1893). In ^87 he did
newspaper work in Boston, and the next two
summers he lectured at Thomas Davidson's
Summer School of Philosophy at Farmington,
Conn., where he met Mrs. Sidney Lanier, widow
of the American poet She gave him a wreath
that had been sent her from the South, and on
this occasion he wrote The Laurel, published in

Hovey
1889. He did a little acting in 1890. In his own
words, "I went on the stage primarily to com-
plete my education as a playwright" (Dartmouth
Lyrics, 1924, edited by E. O. Grover, p. 86).
The last ten years of the poet's life were to
mark the flowering of his genius. In 1891 ap-
peared the first part of his poem in dramas,
Launcelot and Guenevere, containing The Quest
of Merlin- and The Marriage of Guenevere. He
spent the year 1891-92 abroad in England and
France, and came under the influence of the
French Symbolistes—especially Verlaine, Mal-
larme, and Maeterlinck. He translated at this
time four of Maeterlinck's plays (La Princesse
Maleine, L'lntruse, Les Aveugles, Les Sept
Princesses), published under the title, The Plays
of Maurice Maeterlinck (1894), to which he
wrote a significant introduction entitled, "Mod-
ern Symbolism and Maurice Maeterlinck."
Songs from Vagabondia, by Richard Hovey and
Bliss Carman appeared in 1894. The first poem
"Vagabondia" struck the keynote with its
"Off with the fetters
That chafe and restrain!
Off with the chain I"
The volume's vivacity and originality took the
country by storm, and collegians went about
chanting Hovey's poems as more than twenty-
five years before Oxonians had chanted Swin-
burne's first series of Poems and Ballads, On
Jan. 17, 1894, the poet married in Boston, Mrs.
Henriette Russell, a pupil of Delsarte, and the
foremost exponent in America of Delsarte's phi-
losophy. Their son, Julian Richard, was born
at the end of the year in Paris. In 1896 appeared
a second series of The Plays of Maurice Maeter-
linck, which contained four more translations
(Alladine et Palomides, Pelleas et Melisande,
L'lnterieur, Le Mori de Tintagiles). During the
same year he issued More Songs from Vaga-
bondia with Bliss Carman. In 1898 there ap-
peared another volume of his poem in dramas,
The Birth of Galahad, and Along the Trail, a
Book of Lyrics. In the latter volume were his
Spanish-American War verses, which were of a
decided chauvinistic flavor but were written with
an almost religious fervor expressed in Biblical
language. Taliesin: a Masque (1896) was the
last completed part of the Launcelot and Guene-
wre cycle to be published, having already ap-
peared in serial form in Poet-Lore. From 1898
to 1900 Hovey was a lecturer in Barnard Col-
lege, Columbia University. For a number of
years he had been suffering from a form of intes-
tinal trouble, and after a slight operation, he died
suddenly in New York City on Feb. 24, 1900.
After his death two more volumes of his