Poems.
Akers, Elizabeth (Florence Percy). Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.
12mo.; marbled endpapers and edges; three-quarter morocco, spine stamped in gilt; marbled boards, light wear to tips. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of the first volume in which Akers published her most popular poem, “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,” under her own name. It debuted in her first collection, Forest Buds, from the Woods of Maine, under the name Florence Percy, in 1856. Despite Akers’s myriad achievements, she is mis-remembered as a minor poet with only this one title to her credit.
Inscribed, "Julia, from Mother," and with Estelle Doheny's book plate.
Akers (1832-1911) began her career as a writer and teacher while still in her teens. In her twenties she was made assistant editor on the Portland Transcript, and later published European sketches in the Transcript as well as in the Boston Evening Gazette. Meanwhile, her poems were appearing in the Atlantic Monthly and other prominent journals, including the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, which first published “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.” During the Civil War, Akers accepted a government clerkship in Washington, D.C., where she devoted much time to hospital work, and in spare moments continued to write verse. When “Rock Me to Sleep” was published in her second collection, Poems, brought out as part of Ticknor and Fields’ Blue and Gold Series, her authorship was challenged by Alexander M.W. Ball, a part-time poet from New Jersey. The challenge was widely broadcast, as “Rock Me to Sleep” had been “set to music, sung by the Christy Minstrels and around Civil War campfires, and widely reprinted.” Akers was eventually vindicated, despite Ball’s publication of the hefty work, A Vindication of the Claim of Alexnader M.W. Ball…to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock Me to Sleep, Mother (1867); John T. Winteritch reports that the controversy “raged through the pages of contemporary pamphlets and periodicals” (“Allen, Elizbaeth Anne Chase Akers,” NAW I, 37).
Though Akers devoted more and more time, in later years, to writing on woman suffrage and animal rights, and though never stopped writing or publishing her poetry, she never achieved a fraction of the success that she saw for “Rock Me to Sleep.” Winteritch concludes, defensively, that Akers was
a minor poet but a competent and graceful versifier. Her capabilities were largely eclipsed by the controversy aroused by her best-known production, which, while not a good poem, is a perfect exemplar of the kind of lump-in-the-throat sentimentality that captures the popular imagination. Her memory deserves better than this. She was among the cleverest fashioners of light verse of her time and probably exerted a beneficent influence on the more skillful practitioners in the same genre who followed her. (ibid.)
Collections of her later verse include The Silver Bridge (1886), The High-Top Sweeting (1891), and The Sunset Song (1902).
(#3898)
Print Inquire
