George Sterling

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George Sterling posing for an illustration of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

George Sterling (1 December 1869 - 17 November 1926), was born in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York. His father was Dr. George A. Sterling, a physician. His mother Mary was a member of the Havens family, prominent in Sag Harbor and the Shelter Island area. Her brother, Frank C. Havens, Sterling's uncle, went to the San Francisco in the late 19th century and established himself as a prominent lawyer and real estate developer. Sterling eventually followed him to the Bay Area in 1890. A poet who became a significant figure in Bohemian literary circles in northern California in the first quarter of the 20th century, and in the development of the artists' colony in Carmel, he was close friends with Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and Clark Ashton Smith, and mentor to Robinson Jeffers.

Kevin Starr (1973) wrote:

"The uncrowned King of Bohemia (so his friends called him), Sterling had been at the center of every artistic circle in the Bay Area. Celebrated as the embodiment of the local artistic scene, though forgotten today, Sterling had in his lifetime been linked with the immortals, his name carved on the walls of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition next to the great poets of the past."

Joseph Noel (1940) says that Sterling's poem, A Wine of Wizardry,[1] has "been classed by many authorities as the greatest poem ever written by an American author."

According to Noel, Sterling sent the final draft of A Wine of Wizardry to the normally acerbic and critical Ambrose Bierce. Bierce said "If I could find a flaw in it, I should quickly call your attention to it... It takes the breath away."

Bierce, who had published Sterling's first poems in his "Prattle" column in William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, arranged for the publication of A Wine of Wizardry in the September 1907 number of Cosmopolitan, which afforded Sterling some national notice. In an introduction to the poem, Bierce wrote "Whatever length of days may be according to this magazine, it is not likely to do anything more notable in literature than it accomplished in this issue by the publication of Mr. George Sterling's poem, 'A Wine of Wizardry.'"

Noel, a personal acquaintance of Sterling, says that when he began the poem, Sterling "was persuaded that there was another world than that we know. He repeated this to me so frequently that it became a trifle tiresome. Of the means he employed to get a glimpse of that other world, I am not so sure." He observes that "many before Sterling had used narcotics to this end;" that "George, a doctor's son, had always had access to whatever drugs he fancied;" says that Sterling's wife said "that George had purloined a great quantity of opium from his brother Wickham," and speaks of "internal evidence in the poem" in which "Sterling writes his Fancy awakened with a 'brow caressed by poppybloom.'" Despite all this, Noel makes a point of saying "there is no direct evidence that Sterling used narcotics."

Despite such famous mentors as Bierce and Ina Coolbrith, and his long association with London, Sterling himself never became well known outside California.

Sterling's poetry is both visionary and mystical. His style reflects the Romantic charm of such poets as Shelley, Keats and Poe, and he provided guidance and encouragement to the similarly-inclined Clark Ashton Smith at the beginning of Smith's own career.

In November of 1926, Sterling committed suicide by swallowing cyanide at his residence at the San Francisco Bohemian Club. Kevin Starr wrote that "When George Sterling's corpse was discovered in his room at the Bohemian Club... the golden age of San Francisco's bohemia had definitely come to a miserable end."

[edit] Trivia

Sterling Road in Berkeley is named for George Sterling.

[edit] References

Benediktsson, Thomas E. (1980). George Sterling. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7313-4.
Noel, Joseph (1940). Footloose in Arcadia. New York: Carrick and Evans.
Starr, Kevin (1973). Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915. Oxford University Press. 1986 reprint: ISBN 0-19-504233-6
Sterling, George (1911). The House of Orchids and Other Poems. San Francisco: A.M. Robertson.
Sterling, George (Joshi, S.T., ed.) (2003). The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror. New York: Hippocampus Press. ISBN 0-9721644-6-4