An intriguing popular poet who most of us have never heard of

There’s a very good article called “How the Best-Selling Poet Gets Forgotten” up at HappenStance.  (Helena Nelson, February 1, 2015.)  It’s about Alice Duer Miller, whose book The White Cliffs sold nearly seven thousand hundred copies in four years. She was much more than just a poet, (Nelson’s story about her is well-worth reading,) but her poetry is highly intriguing.  As Nelson writes, 

 

“She was not a modernist. She loved Tennyson, and Scott, and Matthew Arnold. And she loved a good story. So three times, in the old tradition, she set about verse narrative, though she brought to it a twist of her own that has not been replicated before or since. Her poetic tales were stories of the human heart – romantic drama, if you like – cast in verse form. Not a single mode, but a sequence of lyric poems seguing from one to another, in and out of ballad, sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, blank verse, heroic couplets – you name it, she would do it. And at the same time she set up dramatic pace and cliff hangers, so the reader, even now, can find herself flicking from one page to the next, compelled to read on.”

 

You can find The White Cliffs at PoemHunter. It sounds cheesy at first, but it’s fun–both for the story and for the forms.

 

THE WHITE CLIFFS

Alice Duer Miller

I have loved England, dearly and deeply,
Since that first morning, shining and pure,
The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply
Out of the sea that once made her secure. 

—

Read rest of poem.