The
individual characters are not strongly differentiated in her many books,
and the heroines bear considerable resemblance to each other, but the
entire community of mountain folk, their ideals, hopes, and circumscribed
lives are clearly and vividly shown.
MADISON J. CAWEIN, 1865-1914
[Illustration: MADISON J. CAWEIN]
Cawein spent the greater part of his life in Louisville, Kentucky, where he
was born in 1865 and died in 1914. He wrote more than twenty volumes of
verse, the best of which he collected in five volumes (1907) and later in
one volume (1911). The appreciative English critic, Edmund Gosse, in his
_Introduction_ to the 1907 collection, calls Cawein "the only hermit
thrush" singing "through an interval comparatively tuneless." W. D.
Howells's (p. 373) _Foreword_ in the 1911 volume emphasizes Cawein's
unusual power of making common things 'live and glow thereafter with
inextinguishable beauty.'
Cawein actually writes much of his poetry out of doors in the presence of
the nature which he is describing. His lyrics of nature are his best verse.
He can even diminish the horror of a Kentucky feud by placing it among:--
"Frail ferns and dewy mosses and dark brush,--
Impenetrable briers, deep and dense,
And wiry bushes,--brush, that seemed to crush
The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence
Sprawled out the ramble of an old rail-fence.
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