John Godfrey Saxe

John Godfrey Saxe I (June 2, 1816 – March 31, 1887) was an American poet known for his re-telling of the Indian parable "", which introduced the story to a Western audience. He also said ""

Saxe was born in 1816 in Highgate, Vermont, at Saxe's Mills, where his settler grandfather, John Saxe (Johannes Sachse), a German immigrant and Loyalist to the Crown, built the area's first gristmill in 1786. Saxe was the son of Peter Saxe, miller, judge and periodic member of the Vermont General Assembly; and Elizabeth Jewett of Weybridge, Vermont. The poet was named for two of his paternal uncles, John and Godfrey, who had died as young men before his birth. Raised in a strict Methodist home, Saxe was first sent, in 1835, to Wesleyan University which he left after a year, and then to Middlebury College, from which he graduated in 1839.

In 1841 he married Sophia Newell Sollace, a sister of a Middlebury classmate, with whom he had a son, John Theodore Saxe.

He was admitted to the Vermont bar in 1843 and tried to run a business with his dutiful and pious older brother, Charles Jewett Saxe. For some years he practised successfully in Franklin County. In 1850-'1 he became state's attorney for Chittenden County.

The words "dutiful" and "pious" never applied to the aspiring satirist. Bored by his legal work, Saxe began publishing poems for The Knickerbocker, of which "The Rhyme of the Rail" is his most famous early work. He soon caught the attention of the prominent Boston publishing house Ticknor and Fields. Though he received no royalties for his first volume, it ran to ten reprintings and eventually outsold works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His poem "The Puzzled Census-Taker" amused many, and "Rhyme of the Rail" was possibly the most admired poem of the period about rail travel. Saxe was editor of the Sentinel in Burlington, Vermont, from 1850 to 1856. In 1856, he served as attorney-general of Vermont.

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