Francis Saltus Saltus
Encyclopedia
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
.
Biography
Born in 1849 in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, he was the elder half-brother of once popular but now relatively obscure novelist Edgar Saltus
Edgar Saltus
Edgar Evertson Saltus was an American writer known for his highly refined prose style. His works paralleled those by European decadent authors such as Huysmans and Oscar Wilde...
. He was educated at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
and later at the Roblot Institution in Paris. Saltus was the leader of a group of bohemians in New York, including his brother Edgar and the young James Huneker
James Huneker
James Gibbons Huneker was an American music writer and critic.Huneker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano in Europe under Leopold Doutreleau and audited the Paris piano class of Frédéric Chopin's pupil Georges Mathias. He came to New York City in 1885 and remained there...
, which met at Billy Moulds' bar in Manhattan's University Place; they were fond of absinthe
Absinthe
Absinthe is historically described as a distilled, highly alcoholic beverage. It is an anise-flavoured spirit derived from herbs, including the flowers and leaves of the herb Artemisia absinthium, commonly referred to as "grande wormwood", together with green anise and sweet fennel...
and had "a taste for anything exotic". Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.- Biography :Brooks was educated at Harvard University and graduated in 1908...
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". His verse reflects a refined, erotic and decadent temperament similar to that of his brother, inspired primarily by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
(of whom he was a student) and Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
. He was praised by influential editor William Marion Reedy as an 'American Baudelaire' whose verse had "the perfume of exquisite sadness." 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
Town Topics (magazine)
Town Topics: The Journal of Society was a magazine published in New York City by William d'Alton Mann and others from 1879 to 1937 . Title varies: Andrew's American Queen; Art, Music, Literature and Society ; and American Queen Town Topics: The Journal of Society was a magazine published in New...
. 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. After an illness lasting several weeks, he died at midnight on June 24th of 1889 at the Riverside Sanitarium in Tarrytown
Sleepy Hollow, New York
Sleepy Hollow is a village in the town of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, about north of midtown Manhattan in New York City, and is served by the Philipse Manor stop on the Metro-North Hudson Line.Originally...
, aged thirty-nine and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York is the resting place of numerous famous figures, including Washington Irving, whose story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is set in the adjacent Old Dutch Burying Ground. Incorporated in 1849 as Tarrytown Cemetery, it posthumously honored Irving's...
. Saltus' father, Francis H. Saltus, edited a four-volume edition of his poetical works after his death. 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
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
which was never published.