Arthur Wheelock Upson (January 10, 1877 – August 14, 1908) was an American poet.

Early life

He was born in

Camden, New York Camden is a town in Oneida County, New York, United States. The population was 4,934 at the 2010 census. The town of Camden contains a village also called Camden. The town is in the northwestern part of Oneida County and is northwest of the Ci ...

, on January 10, 1877, to Spencer Johnson Upson and Julia Claflin. His family moved from New York to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1894, with Upson entering the University of Minnesota with the class of 1898. There, he served as editor of the campus newspaper, ''the Minnesota Daily''. While a student at University of Minnesota, he was a member of the Beta Pi chapter of

Beta Theta Pi Beta Theta Pi (), commonly known as Beta, is a North American social fraternity that was founded in 1839 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. One of North America's oldest fraternities, as of 2022 it consists of 144 active chapters in the Unite ...

. Unable to complete the requirements for a degree due to his ill health, he was later awarded a degree in 1906 due to his literary success, becoming an instructor there the same year. Upson reworked the song "

Hail! Minnesota "Hail! Minnesota" (also simply called "Minnesota" in early years) is the regional anthem (or "state song") of the U.S. state of Minnesota. A variation is used as a school song of the University of Minnesota. It originated at the university in the ...

", at the request of the school's president

Cyrus Northrop Cyrus Northrop (September 30, 1834 – April 3, 1922) was an American university president. Early life Cyrus Northrop, Sr. was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University in 1857 where he was a member of both Alpha Sigma Ph ...

, the song later becoming the state song of Minnesota and the ''alma mater'' of the University of Minnesota.

Career

'' The Bellman (literary magazine)'' was almost the first magazine to publish the work of American writer

Arthur Upson Arthur Wheelock Upson (January 10, 1877 – August 14, 1908) was an American poet. Early life He was born in Camden, New York, on January 10, 1877, to Spencer Johnson Upson and Julia Claflin. His family moved from New York to Saint Paul, Minne ...

Death

Upson died at age 31, drowning after falling from his boat in Lake Bemidji, Minnesota, on August 14, 1908. His body was found after he had been missing for two days. The boat which he fell from had capsized and had lacked one of its oars. It was suspected that Upson's death was a suicide, as he already attempted suicide only three years before. Upson was mourned as having been a highly promising artist, with the young Sinclair Lewis writing an editorial obituary that exalted Upson, comparing him to a Keats or a

Chatterton Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Althoug ...

.Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. McGraw-Hill, 1961. Page 142. His collected poems, edited with an introduction by fellow poet Richard Burton, were published in 1908. Burton also published "an elegy on the death" of Upson in 1910 entitled ''a Midsummer Memory''.

Notes

Bibliography

*''Westwind Songs'' (1902

*''Octaves in an Oxford Garden'' (1902

*''The City: a Poem Drama'' (1905

*''The Tides of Spring and Other Poems'' (1907

*''Collected Poems'' (1909

https://archive.org/details/collectedpoemsed02upsouoft]

External links

The Arthur Upson Room
{{DEFAULTSORT:Upson, Arthur 1877 births 1908 deaths 20th-century American poets University of Minnesota alumni 19th-century American poets American male poets 19th-century American male writers 20th-century American male writers Deaths by drowning in the United States