Francis Saltus Saltus

Francis Saltus Saltus (November 23, 1849 - June 24, 1889) was an American poet. Born in 1849 in New York City, he was the elder brother of once popular but now relatively obscure novelist Edgar Saltus."The Bookmart": Volume Seven, June, 1889 to May, 1890. Page 95.] He was educated at Columbia UniversityVechten, Carl Van. "Excavations: a Book of Advocacies". Page 95. Ayer Publishing, 1971.] and later at the Roblot Institution in Paris. Saltus was the leader of a group of bohemians in New York, including his brother Edgar, which met at Billy Moulds' bar in Manhattan's University Place; they were fond of absinthe and had "a taste for anything exotic". [Morris, Lloyd R. "Incredible New York". Page 177. Ayer Publishing, 1975.] Van Wyck Brooks remarked that the unhappy Saltus "looked like a Greek god gone to ruin, partly as a result of the absinthe that he drank to excess". [Brooks, Van Wyck. "The Confident Years, 1885-1915". Page 3. Dutton, 1955.] His verse reflects a refined, erotic and decadent temperament similar to that of his brother, inspired primarily by Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier (of whom he was a student) [Huneker, James. "Steeplejack". Page 12. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.] and Charles Baudelaire. He was praised by influential editor William Marion Reedy as an 'American Baudelaire' whose verse had "the perfume of exquisite sadness."Putzel, Max. J. "The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine". Page 44. University of Missouri Press, 1998.] Able to converse in ten languages, Saltus also wrote poems in Italian, German and French.

He was a frequent contributor to American and international periodicals, such as "Town Topics". A talented musician, he wrote four comic operas and much musical criticism. Much of his humorous, commercial work was written under the pseudonym Cupid Jones. Saltus wrote and edited a comic paper entitled "the Thistle" in the 1870s, the entire contents of which were written by him and signed with various pseudonyms. ["The Bookman: an Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life": Volume XXII, September, 1905-February 1906. Page 82.] After an illness lasting several weeks, he died at midnight on June 24th of 1889 at the Riverside Sanitarium in Tarrytown, aged thirty-nine ["The New York Times": Obituary, Page 5. June 26, 1889.] and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. [Crandall, Charles Henry (editor). "Representative Sonnets by American Poets". Page 342. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890.] Saltus' father, Francis H. Saltus, edited a four-volume edition of his poetical works after his death.Stedman, Edmund Clarence (editor). "An American Anthology, 1787-1900". Page 819. Houghton Mifflin, 1900.] Saltus left behind a good deal of unpublished material, including "five thousand lyrics for posthumous publication" and several musical biographies, including a life of Gaetano Donizetti which was never published.

Bibliography

*"Honey and Gall" (1873) [http://www.archive.org/details/honeyandgall00saltiala]
*"Shadows and Ideals" (1890) [http://books.google.com/books?id=8F5NuWrjl7EC&pg=PR17#PPR8,M1]
*"The Witch of En-dor and Other Poems" (1891) [http://www.archive.org/details/witchofendorothe00saltrich]
*"Dreams after Sunset" (1892) [http://books.google.com/books?id=XN1LrBJTofoC&pg=PA1&#PPR7,M1]
*"Flasks and Flagons, Pastels and Profiles, Vistas and Landscapes" (1892) [http://books.google.com/books?id=mnQ1AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1#PPR5,M1]
*"The Bayadere and Other Sonnets" (1894) [http://books.google.com/books?id=13E1AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3#PPR1,M1]
*"Fact and Fancy" (1895) [http://www.archive.org/details/factandfancy00saltiala]

Notes

External links

* [http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/saltus01.html Selected Works by Francis Saltus at Poets' Corner]