Love Lyrics

1898

Only a lover could have written “Love Lyrics.” All poets are lovers, but few of them write love’s language in the expressive way in which Mr. Putnam does. Perhaps the chief beauty of the little volume lies in the individuality of the poems, each one being entirely different from the others.

I do not think I have ever read any poems that struck me with their clear ring of sincerity and grace as these do. His songs appeal to the heart; they touch a responsive chord in us. They are human, vital, full of life and warmth of expression. In these days of poseurs and affected poets it is refreshing to pick up a little volume that vibrates with its genuineness; that reflects the true character of the man who wrote it. Frank Putnam’s is no studied art. Every poem is a song that lingers in the ear like Japanese music. One wants to hear more.

There is a sermon found in the lines: And one envies him his “felicity” with his “morsel of frivolity.”

Mary Chapman is the Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive, a Professor of English, and Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub at University of British Columbia. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism (Oxford UP) and of numerous articles about American literature and women writers. She has also edited Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queen’s UP) and published essays on the Eaton sisters in American Quarterly, MELUS, Legacy, Canadian Literature, and American Periodicals. Her current research project is a microhistory of the Eaton family. For more information, see http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/mchapman/.

Sydney Lines is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of British Columbia, Project Manager for the UBC Public Humanities Hub, and Project Manager of The Winnifred Eaton Archive. She is writing a dissertation called “Romancing the Empire: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the Writings of Winnifred Eaton and Laura Goodman Salverson.”

See the Biographical Timeline for biographical information on Winnifred Eaton.

Joey Takeda is the Technical Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive and a Developer at Simon Fraser University’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL). He is a graduate of the M.A. program in English at the University of British Columbia where he specialized in Indigenous and diasporic literature, science and technology studies, and the digital humanities.

Chicago-based, also known as the Blakely Printing Company. Established in 1871. Company established a newspaper in 1898.