Background
John Boner was born on January 31, 1845, in Salem, North Carolina, United States, the son of Thomas Jacob and Phoebe Elizabeth Boner.
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John Boner was born on January 31, 1845, in Salem, North Carolina, United States, the son of Thomas Jacob and Phoebe Elizabeth Boner.
After an academic education varied by rambles along the Yadkin River and prentice work at versifying, John was put to learn the printer's trade.
At twenty-two John Boner ventured to establish the Salem Observer but met with failure; in the same year he edited the Asheville Pioneer. Moved by Whig influence and antislavery sentiment among his Moravian ancestors, Boner early cast his lot with the Republican party. He was recognized by appointment as secretary of the constitutional convention (1868) and as clerk of the House of Representatives of North Carolina (1869, 1870). But in the following year the Carpet-Baggers were routed at the polls, and Boner, refusing to modify his politics, found all doors closed to him in his own state. He had been worsted in his first encounter with partisan government. Removing to Washington, he entered the Government Printing Office as typesetter. His first publication, Sparrows in the Snow (1877), was negligible; but Whispering Pines (1883) won the poet recognition in New York, and friendship from Edmund Clarence Stedman.
Although Boner's lyrics of this period were entirely conventional, his sketches of life among Moravians and negroes were sincere and appealing. At this juncture, the Democratic party gained control of national affairs; Boner's activities in North Carolina were recalled; and he was dismissed from his position as proofreader because of "offensive partisanship. " For the second time the vagaries of politics had frustrated the poet. Brought to New York by Stedman, Boner soon established himself as an editor, serving on The Century Dictionary (1887 - 1891), A Library of American Literature (1888 - 1890), the New York World (1891 -18 92), and The Standard Dictionary (1892 - 1894). His lyrics were now surer in execution, deeper and wider in emotional range; but sentimentalism defeated his attempt at interpreting the metropolis in verse.
Elated by appointment in 1894 as an editor on the Literary Digest, he began building a home for his old age, "Cricket Lodge" on Staten Island. But in the following year he disagreed violently with his editor and characteristically resigned rather than yield to his superior. Weakened in health, he struggled to support himself by hack writing, particularly for Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia (1896 - 1899). Out of disaster came his finest lyrics - his chief claim to more than local reputation. Such work, however, did not maintain the payments on "Cricket Lodge": his home was lost. Thus the poet, unable to concede or to conciliate, was finally broken by the discipline of journalism. Ill and destitute, Boner was in 1900 reinstated in his former position in Washington, through the intervention of friends. His health did not allow him to remain at the desk: he recuperated in North Carolina. In January 1903 he returned to Washington, where he died.
Boner had failed to adjust himself to the realities of a commercial civilization. The Boner Memorial Association in 1904 removed his remains from the Congressional Cemetery in Washington to the Moravian burying-ground in his beloved Salem. Participation in this ceremony by the governor of the state indicated that the foremost poet of North Carolina was no longer an alien among his own people.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
John Boner was a member of the Republican party.
His associates found Boner dignified and reserved: only his wife and a few intimates knew his gentle humanity. He was sensitive and high-spirited, kind yet unyielding.
Boner married Lottie Smith of Raleigh.