Arthur Upson

Arthur Upson Poems

Arthur Upson Biography

Arthur Wheelock Upson (January 10, 1877 - August 14, 1908) was an American poet. He was born in Camden, New York on January 10, 1877 to Spencer Johnson Upson and Julia Claflin. His family moved from New York to Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1894, with Upson entering the University of Minnesota 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", at the request of the school's president Cyrus Northrop, 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, Minnesota 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 writing an editorial obituary that exalted Upson, comparing him to a Keats or a Chatterton. 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.)

The Best Poem Of Arthur Upson

Euchenor Chorus

Of old it went forth to Euchenor, pronounced of his sire --
Reluctant, impelled by the god's unescapable fire --
To choose for his doom or to perish at home of disease
Or be slain of his foes, among men, where Troy surges down to the seas.

Polyides, the soothsayer, spake it, inflamed by the god.
Of his son whom the fates singled out did he bruit it abroad;
And Euchenor went down to the ships with his armor and men
And straightway, grown dim on the gulf, passed the isles
   he passed never again.

Why weep ye, O women of Corinth? The doom ye have heard
Is it strange to your ears that ye make it so mournful a word?
Is he who so fair in your eyes to his manhood upgrew,
Alone in his doom of pale death -- are of mortals the beaten so few?

O weep not, companions and lovers! Turn back to your joys:
The defeat was not his which he chose, nor the victory Troy's.
Him a conqueror, beauteous in youth, o'er the flood his fleet brought,
And the swift spear of Paris that slew completed the conquest he sought.

Not the falling proclaims the defeat, but the place of the fall;
And the fate that decrees and the god that impels through it all
Regard not blind mortals' divisions of slayer and slain,
But invisible glories dispense wide over the war-gleaming plain.

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