Background

Richard Hovey was born on March 4, 1864, in Normal, Illinois, United States. His parents, Charles Edward and Harriet Spofford Hovey, were learned though they were not affluent; Charles Edward Hovey was a sometime Civil War major general who had also served briefly as the president of the State Normal University of Illinois. Harriet Hovey, who was Hovey’s primary teacher during his adolescence, was a translator of French texts and a teacher.

Education

Hovey received a first-rate education from his mother; by the time he entered Dartmouth College, in 1881, he had already published a volume of poems and was the youngest freshman admitted. Hovey flourished at Dartmouth, joining the Psi Upsilon fraternity early on and editing the Aegis. He graduated cum laude in 1885, but instead of pursuing a career right away, he took time to meander, writing his poems in an unfocused way in Washington, D.C. For a year he studied theology at the Episcopalian Seminary but left without taking orders.

Career

Richard Hovey began his career as a newspaper reporter in Boston - where he met the Canadian poet Bliss Carman, with whom so much of his poetry would be written. Hovey also met Thomas Davidson, who hired Hovey as a philosophy instructor at his summer school and also helped to form the young man’s notion of poetic mission.

Choosing to do a little acting in order to become a better playwright, he soon thereafter wrote the first of his dramatic poems Lancelot and Guenevere which contained The Quest of Merlin and The Marriage of Guenevere.

Hovey traveled to London and to Giverny, where he continued to work on his series of plays. Then, while in America, Hovey rejoined his friend Carman, with whom he wrote Songs of Vagabondia (1894), a collection of poems. Hovey still retained ties to America, however, he would often write songs for his fraternity or for Dartmouth, giving voice to the emotions every twenty-year-old might feel. With his hopes still before him, Hovey returned again to the United States to teach at Barnard College, in 1899.

Hovey’s promise and major work, however, were unfinished when he died in 1900 from a blood clot in the heart following minor surgery for a testicular varicocele. His unfinished work was published posthumously, but Hovey’s vision did not seem complete to many critics.

Achievements

• Richard Hovey is best known for his muscular, “vagabond” poetry, in which he extolled the virtues of camaraderie, open air, and song. Though Hovey died at the age of thirty-five, he did produce a healthy assortment of poems and plays. Hovey’s most famous works are the outdoorsy, masculine rhymes he wrote for his old fraternity at Dartmouth College: “Ho, a song by the fire! Pass the pipes, fill the bowl!”

Works

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  • The Birth of Galahad

    (The Birth of Galahad is the finest of the trilogy, both i...)

    1898
  • The Holy Grail and Other Fragments

    (The Holy Grail and Other Fragments by Richard Hovey is th...)

    1907
  • The Laurel, An Ode

    (An ode in verse to Mary Day Lanier.)

    1889
  • The Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck 1894
  • Seaward: An Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons 1893
  • Launcelot And Guenevere: A Poem In Dramas, Volume 3 1891
  • To the End of the Trail 1908
  • Along the Trail: A Book of Lyrics 1898
  • Day and Night 1897
  • Songs from Vagabondia 1894
  • Taliesin: A Masque 1899
  • More Songs from Vagabondia 1896
  • Last Songs from Vagabondia 1900
  • The Marriage of Guenevere 1899

Views

Hovey believed the poet must be concerned with the surrounding people. He must enlighten them by his perceptions and thus offer them solutions to their problems. In an effort to engage as completely as possible with his readers, Hovey decided to compose verse dramas, in which he might also express himself most fully. These dramas, which were never finished, were to examine themes derived from Hovey’s own life.

Two themes are central in his dramas: the supremacy of the love relationship between man and woman (through the Arthur-Guenevere-Launcelot triangle he illustrates the tension between personal choice, inspired by love, and social order, defined by law); and the plight of the ‘new woman’ whom he saw as having developed beyond the social limitations which stifle her intellect and natural rights.

Membership

Hovey was a member of the Psi Upsilon.

Personality

Hovey's exuberant identification with nature suggests something of his appeal as a college poet. Due to his untimely death, Hovey has remained a “college” poet - eternally writing his youthful, deep breathing paeans to nature and his own health. Whether his vision would have shifted as he aged is impossible to say; but what he left, in his undiluted, exuberant homage to the passions and pleasures of youth, is perhaps what he should, eventually, have found “in his own best vein.”

Quotes from others about the person

• “Much inspired by Walt Whitman, Hovey sang of the open road and masculine friendship he found in his college fraternity and with Thomas Meteyard and Bliss Carman during their summers in the outdoors. Through such verse Hovey, along with Edwin Markham, James Whitcomb Riley, and Eugene Field, challenged the poetry of the genteel tradition that prevailed in the barren time after the era of Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” - Meredith Yearsley
  
  “From his close relationship with his mother, Hovey apparently developed the high regard and sympathy for women which later characterized his relationships with them and emerged in his writing.” - Meredith Yearsley
  
  “Much as his untimely death is to be lamented by every lover of verse, it is impossible to consider what remains of his cycle as a great or very significant poem or to believe that even if it were finished it would be other than a work ‘manque’ as a whole, a thing of brilliant passages and splendid promise for the time when the author should have found himself in his own best vein.” - a critic writing for the Nation

Connections

In 1888, Hovey was deeply engaged in a passionate correspondence with Amelie Rives, a novelist who was engaged to another man. The relationship ultimately ended.

After his loving affair with Amelie Rives, Hovey found himself in yet another love triangle, this one with Mrs. Henriette Knapp Russell. Hovey and Russell fell in love, but both endured time and trial before she was able to divorce her husband and marry Hovey. In 1892, while she was still married to her husband, she bore him a son Julian; the boy was put in foster care while Hovey returned to America, financially broken and in disgrace. In 1894, Hovey and Henriette Knapp got married.

Father:

Charles Edward Hovey

Mother:

Harriet Spofford Hovey

Son:

Julian Hovey

Mistress:

Amelie Rives

Wife:

Mrs. Henriette Knapp Russell

A magnificent woman, who wore flowing corsetless costumes, she was a leading authority on a popular form of physical training known as Delsartism. She was well-known by the powerful and the influential, in whose drawing rooms she had given many private classes. In London, she had counted Oscar Wilde, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Felix Moschelles, Robert Browning, Lady Shelley, Lord Lytton, and James McNeill Whistler among her friends.

Friend:

Bliss Carman

Friend:

Thomas Buford Meteyard

1865-1928

Friend:

Thomas William Parsons

August 18, 1819 – September 3, 1892,

References

• Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature
  1991
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 54, Third Series, American Poets 1880-1945
  1987
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature
  1995