Edmund Clarence Stedman

Edmund Clarence Stedman (October 8, 1833 – January 18, 1908) was an American poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist.

Edmund Clarence Stedman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 8, 1833; his father, Major Edmund Burke Stedman died of tuberculosis two years later in December 1835. By the following spring, his mother Elizabeth Clementine Stedman moved the boy and his younger brother to Plainfield, New Jersey to live with her wealthy father, David Low Dodge. Dodge, a Calvinist and pacifist, was strict, did not want to use his finances to support his grandchildren, and often physically punished the boys for bad behavior. Mrs. Stedman sold poems and stories to magazines including Graham's Magazine, Sartain's Magazine, The Knickerbocker, and Godey's Lady's Book for income. Eventually, the children were taken in by their paternal grandfather, Griffin Stedman, and his brother James in Norwich, Connecticut.

Stedman studied two years at Yale University; became a journalist in New York City, especially on the staffs of the Tribune and World, for which latter paper he served as field correspondent during the first years of the Civil War. As opportunity offered, he studied law and was for a time private secretary to Attorney-General Bates at Washington, and was a member of the in Wall Street from 1865 to 1900. His first book, Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic, appeared in 1860, followed by successive volumes of similar character, and by collected editions of his verse in 1873, 1884 and 1897. His longer poems are Alice of Monmouth: an Idyl of the Great War (1864); The Blameless Prince (1869), an allegory of good deeds, supposed to have been remotely suggested by the life of Prince Albert; and an elaborate commemorative ode on Nathaniel Hawthorne, read before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1877.

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