Arthur Wheelock Upson was an American poet. He was born in Camden, New York

Camden, New York

Camden, New York may refer to:* Camden , New York, a township of Oneida County* Camden , New York, a village within Camden township...

 on January 10, 1877 to Spencer Johnson Upson and Julia Claflin. His family moved from New York to Saint Paul, Minnesota

Saint Paul, Minnesota

Saint Paul is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city...

 in 1894, with Upson entering the University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

 with the class of 1898. There, he served as editor of the campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. 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

"Hail! Minnesota" is the state song of Minnesota, and a variation is used as a school song of the University of Minnesota. It originated at the university in the early 1900s when some students decided to honor their graduating class with a new song...

", at the request of the school's president Cyrus Northrop

Cyrus Northrop

Cyrus Northrop was an American university president.He was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University in 1857 and at the law school there in 1859. Two years later he was appointed clerk of the Connecticut House of Representatives and in 1862 clerk of the Senate...

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

Upson died at age 31, drowning after falling from his boat in Lake Bemidji

Lake Bemidji

Lake Bemidji is a small glacially-formed lake, approximately 11 mi² in area, in northern Minnesota in the United States. Located less than 50 mi downstream from the source of the Mississippi River, it both receives and is drained by the Mississippi.-Geography:The lake is located in southern...

, Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 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

Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...

 writing an editorial obituary that exalted Upson, comparing him to a Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

 or a Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval poetry. He died of arsenic poisoning, either from a suicide attempt or self-medication for a venereal disease.-Childhood:...

. 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.

External links

• The Arthur Upson Room