Edward Rowland Sill

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Edward Rowland Sill (April 29, 1841 – February 27, 1887), American poet and educator, was born in Windsor, Connecticut.

He graduated from Yale in 1861, where he was class poet. He engaged in business in California, and entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1867 but soon left it for a position on the staff of the New York Evening Mail. After teaching at Wadsworth and Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio (1868-1871), he became principal of the Oakland High School, California.

He was professor of English literature at the University of California during the period 1874–1882. His health was failing, and he returned to Cuyahoga Falls in 1883. He devoted himself to literary work, abundant and largely anonymous, until his death in Cleveland, Ohio.

Much of his poetry was contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, the Century Magazine, and the Overland Monthly. Many of his graceful prose essays appeared in The Contributors Club, and others appeared in the main body of the Atlantic. Among his works are:

A translation of Rau's Mozart (1868)
The Hermitage and Other Poems (1868)
The Venus of Milo and Other Poems (1883), a farewell tribute to his California friends
Poems (1887)
The Hermitage and Later Poems (1889)
Hermione and Other Poems (1900)
The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill (1900)
Poems (1902)

He was a modest and charming man, a graceful essayist, a sure critic. His contribution to American poetry is small but of fine quality. His best poems, such as "The Venus of Milo," "The Fool's Prayer" and "Opportunity," gave him a high place among the minor poets of America, which might have been higher but for his early death.

See A Memorial volume privately printed by his friends in 1887; and Biographical sketch in The Poetical Works of Edward Rowland Sill (Boston, 1906), edited by William Belmont Parker with Mrs Sill's assistance.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.