The beginnings of poetry

by Francis Barton Gummere

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483 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 2013

About the author

Francis Barton Gummere was an influential scholar of folklore and ancient languages, a student of Francis James Child.

Gummere was a descendent of an old German-American Quaker family; his grandfather John Gummere was one of the founders of the Haverford School, which became Haverford College, of which Gummere's father Samuel James Gummere was the first president. Gummere graduated from Haverford at the age of 17. After working for several years, he returned to study and received an A.B. from Harvard University and an A.M. from Haverford in 1875. From 1875 to 1881 he taught at the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father had taught some years previously. During these years he took trips to Europe to pursue further studies, ultimately earning a PhD magna cum laude at Freiburg in 1881.

After a year teaching English at Harvard, Gummere spent five years as the headmaster of the Swain Free School in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1887 he became an English professor at Haverford, a position he held until his death on May 30, 1919. One of his best known ideas was his theory of communal composition of ballads, articulated in his 1911 book Democracy and Poetry. Gummere was also a translator; his Beowulf was published in 1910 as part of the Harvard Classics series. In 1991 John Espey wrote of Gummere's Beowulf, "it remains the most successful attempt to render in modern English something similar to the alliterative pattern of the original". A graphic novel version of Beowulf by Gareth Hinds published in the 2000s uses Gummere's translation.

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