William C. Edgar

by Joel Van Valin

Most publishers have (or at least at one time had) literary ambitions of their own. The time and solitude needed for poetry or fiction, however, are not easily found in the rough-and-tumble publishing world. And publishers and editors tend to be objective and well read-making them all too sensible of their modest abilities. Their work is often irregular, and done to suit the larger needs of the publishing enterprise. So it was that William C. Edgar, publisher of the famous newspaper The Bellman from 1906 to 1918, waited until 1921 to issue his one and only book of poetry, Rhymes of a Doggerel Bard.

Edgar came into publishing from (of all places) the milling industry. Born in LaCrosse, his family moved to St. Louis during his childhood. He worked at a St. Louis business house before finding a job in Minneapolis as the business manager for the newspaper The Northerwestern Miller in 1882. Minneapolis was then the largest milling center in the world, and the newspaper catered to a fast-paced industry. The young manager was allowed to slip in some poetry now and again under a column called "Lyrics by the Lusty Lyre". As the introduction to Doggerel Bard explains, "He wrote them chiefly for his own amusement, as a relief from more prosaic duties, and they were tolerated by the editor as an innovation which might prove unobjectionable to the reader." As the newspaper contained mill industry news, it is no surprise that the Lusty Lyre poems (which make up the first part of Doggerel Bard) are about millers and their trade.

How many poems can reasonably be written about the mill? To Edgar it seems there were endless possibilities. Some poems focus on the market, such as "We Told You So":

Perhaps it was you,
Or perhaps it was I,
But whoever first said it,
Now neither deny
That wheat was an excellent purchase
The day we neglected to buy.

Others use the mill stone as a metaphor. In "The Mill of the Years" Edgar paints time as a mill of humanity: "The good deeds grade Patent; you usually find / That forty percent is the most these mills grind." Current events also come into play. In the 1880s England was seen as the great economic threat to the United States (just as Japan was in the 1980s and China is today). This was the inspiration for "To Our Masters":

Hail, England, hail! Or, as your sons say `ail'.
Thou pluck'st the feathers
From the Eagle's tail.

You own our railways,
Capture all our land,
And buy up brewers
With a mighty hand.

Thine are the cattle On our thousand hills;
And thine at last, alas!
Our flouring mills.

Hail, mighty England!
Tho' she won in fight,
America is conquered
By your checkbook's might.

Perhaps the best known of Edgar's mill poems was an epitaph he wrote in 1890. A miller in Ohio had the poem carved on his mill wheel with the idea of making it his grave stone. The press got ahold of the story and the epitaph appeared in newspapers on the East Coast, in England, and even in India.

Beneath this stone a miller lies
Who left the world before the rise
Of modern ways of making flour,
And hence passed many a happy hour.
He was not forced to speculate,
Nor on Chicago's movements wait;
He did not care for foreign trade,
But sold his neighbors all he made.
Cables and telegrams were rare-
The markets did not make him swear;
Small was his mill, his profits round;
Clear was his head, his slumbers sound.
He envied none, was envied not,
And died contented with his lot.

In 1886 Edgar became the editor of The Northwestern Miller. Now having to churn out prose on a regular basis, his poetic output lessened. His gifts to literature, however, were just beginning. Edgar published The Bellman, which he founded in his fiftieth year, alongside editing The Northwestern Miller-quite a task in an era before computers and electronic typesetting! Although often cited as a literary journal, The Bellman was in fact a weekly newspaper publishing a mishmash of world news, financial news, essays, arts reviews, and local gossip. Most issues did contain one piece of fiction, and occasionally poetry (Sarah Teasdale and Joyce Kilmer were among the noted poets who appeared within its pages). Although The Bellman published in the golden age of American literature, when experimentalists such as William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, and Amy Lowell were in their hayday, its stories and poetry have a bucolic, 19th Century feel. The poetry is all rhyme and meter, and the fiction in the dime novel tradition. Edgar's own contributions included poems, mostly in the comic vein. Which is probably for the best-he had no talent for sentiment; the first line, for example, of one of his serious poems, "Absent", begins "Since you are gone, the old haunts cease to charm..." The latter portion of Rhymes of a Doggerel Bard reprints some of these poems, along with others that appeared in Harper's Weekly in elsewhere. Notable is a ballad in parody of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" entitled "The Rhyme of the Lost Toboggan", and "The Pathetic Ballad of Wayzata", occasioned by rumors that President Taft was considering establishing a summer white house on Lake Minnetonka.

Few cities ever made pretense
To presidential residence,
And residential presidents
Are rightly reckoned rare events,
Therefore Wayzata, named Royal Town,
Awakened from its slumber to renown,
Forthwith began to do itself up brown.