Thomas Parker Sanborn
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Thomas Parker Sanborn (February 24, 1865 - March 2, 1889) was an American poet. He was born to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and Louisa Sanborn, née Leavitt, on February 24, 1865 in Concord, Massachusetts. He spent most of his early years in Concord, although he also attended school in Springfield, Massachusetts, and during the winter of 1880-1881, was briefly a student at Phillips Academy in Exeter.[1] Sanborn later attended Harvard University, where he was one of the founders of the Harvard Monthly, as well as serving as an editor of the Harvard Advocate and as president of the Harvard Lampoon. Sanborn was selected to write the class ode in his senior year. Sanborn was a close friend of philosopher and fellow poet George Santayana, with whom he graduated with in the class of 1886.
After graduating, Sanborn resided in Springfield, where worked on the staff of the Springfield Republican, becoming the paper's "literary and dramatic sub-editor."[1] His already precarious health declined in the spring of 1888, with Sanborn ultimately choosing to return to Concord in the fall, where he continued to contribute to the Republican each week. Although his physical health improved, his depression increased. Suffering from hallucinations, Sanborn committed suicide on March 2, 1889, reportedly having slit his throat in the bath with a razor.[2]
Remembered by his contemporaries as a tragic figure who held much literary promise, he came to be linked with a group of other 1890s Harvard poets who died young, including Hugh McCulloch, Philip Henry Savage, Trumbull Stickney and George Cabot Lodge. Santayana published two obituaries for Sanborn, the first of which appeared in Harvard Monthly in March of 1889. In his 1943 memoirs, Santayana remembered Sanborn as "a poet of lyric and modest flights...His poems showed genuine feeling, not naturally in harmony with the over-intellectualized transcendentalism of Concord, Massachusetts, where his father was a conspicuous member of the Emersonian circle."[2]
