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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Thomas William Parsons was an American dentist, poet, and translator of Dante.
Background
Thomas William Parsons was born on August 18, 1819 in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Thomas William and Asenath (Read) Parsons. His father, a native of Bristol, England, received the degree of M. D. from Harvard in 1818 and practised medicine and dentistry in Boston.
Education
Thomas William Parsons attended the Boston Public Latin School for six years, but did not graduate. In 1836 he made his first trip to Italy and other European countries, and upon returning to Boston in 1837, entered the Harvard Medical School. Although he received no medical degree, he practised dentistry intermittently in Boston and afterwards in London, and was commonly called Dr. Parsons.
Career
Thomas William Parsons' original poetry is frequently contemplative in tone, dwelling on religion and death, and at times rising to ecstatic fervor, but at other times he could be humorous, personal, and playful. He wrote verses on the death of prominent men and for public occasions such as the opening of the Boston Theatre in 1854, the opening of the Players' Club in New York in 1888. His style was influenced by his study of Dante, an absorbing pursuit with him for more than fifty years. He shared with Dante a horror of slovenly work, and devoted infinite care to perfecting his verses, often rewriting them after they had appeared in print. Nevertheless, he seemed indifferent to the ultimate fate of his poems, which usually appeared in newspapers or magazines, or in small, privately printed volumes.
During his first stay in Italy Parsons started to commit the Divina Commedia to memory and to translate it into English. In 1841 he published in the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot (October 7) the most frequently quoted of his original poems, "On a Bust of Dante, " called by Stedman "the peer of any modern lyric in our tongue. " In revised form these verses appeared in a little volume which Parsons printed anonymously in Boston in 1843: The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri: Newly Translated into English Verse. This was the earliest published American translation of any considerable portion of Dante. In 1865 seventeen translated cantos were privately printed by Parsons, and the entire Inferno, with Doré's illustrations, was published in Boston in 1867, the year in which Longfellow's version of the entire Divine Comedy appeared.
Parsons published about two-thirds of the Purgatorio between 1870 and 1883 in the Catholic World. In 1893, after his death, the whole Inferno, all that could be found of the Purgatorio, and fragments of the Paradiso were issued in one volume. The translation aims to reproduce the spirit rather than the letter of the original; being in rhymed quatrains which correspond to Dante's tercets, the wording is necessarily sometimes extended, yet on the whole the meaning is reproduced with remarkable fidelity. Among rhymed English renderings of Dante's poem, that of Parsons, incomplete though it is, takes high rank for its nobility of style and its verbal felicity. Only his own fastidiousness and desire for perfection prevented him from completing it. Much of Parsons' original verse was inspired by the picturesqueness of the Italian scene; but he had by nature something of Dante's detachment from the world and dwelt, as Louise Imogen Guiney said of him, "in a joyous cloister of the imagination. "
Among his most finished lyrics are particularly those of religious feeling, like "Paradisi Gloria, " which has been called "one of the few faultless lyrics in the language". Parsons was taken by Longfellow as the model for "the Poet" in his "Tales of a Wayside Inn"; he has been compared to the English writers Gray, Collins, and Landor, and has been called "a poet for poets" (Stedman, post).
The last twenty years of his life were devoted to literary pursuits, chiefly in Boston, Scituate, and Wayland. After a period of failing health, he died while visiting his younger sister in Scituate; his body was found in a well into which he had fallen while suffering, apparently, from a stroke of apoplexy. Thomas William Parsons died on September 3, 1892. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.
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Personality
By nature reserved, sensitive, and deeply religious, Thomas William Parsons felt himself out of sympathy with the times, and he seldom appeared in general society.
Quotes from others about the person
T. B. Aldrich said of him: "He carried his solitude with him into the street. "
Connections
In 1857 Thomas William Parsons married Anna (or Hannah) M. Allen (1821 - 1881) of Boston.