Francis Saltus Saltus (November 23, 1849 - June 24, 1889) was an American poet.
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Born in 1849 in New York City, he was the elder half-brother of once popular but now relatively obscure novelist Edgar Saltus.[1] He was educated at Columbia University[2] and later at the Roblot Institution in Paris.[3] Saltus was the leader of a group of bohemians in New York, including his brother Edgar and the young James Huneker, which met at Billy Moulds' bar in Manhattan's University Place; they were fond of absinthe and had "a taste for anything exotic".[4] Van Wyck Brooks remarked that the unhappy Saltus "looked like a Greek god gone to ruin, partly as a result of the absinthe that he drank to excess".[5] His verse reflects a refined, erotic and decadent temperament similar to that of his brother, inspired primarily by Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier (of whom he was a student)[6] and Charles Baudelaire. He was praised by influential editor William Marion Reedy as an 'American Baudelaire' whose verse had "the perfume of exquisite sadness."[7] Able to converse in ten languages, Saltus also wrote poems in Italian, German and French.[2]
He was a frequent contributor to American and international periodicals, such as Town Topics. A talented musician, he wrote four comic operas and much musical criticism.[1] Much of his humorous, commercial work was written under the pseudonym Cupid Jones. Saltus wrote and edited a comic paper entitled the Thistle in the 1870s, the entire contents of which were written by him and signed with various pseudonyms.[8] After an illness lasting several weeks, he died at midnight on June 24th of 1889 at the Riverside Sanitarium in Tarrytown, aged thirty-nine[9] and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.[10] Saltus' father, Francis H. Saltus, edited a four-volume edition of his poetical works after his death.[3] Saltus left behind a good deal of unpublished material, including "five thousand lyrics for posthumous publication"[7] and several musical biographies, including a life of Gaetano Donizetti which was never published.