Eugene Field

Eugene Field was the “poet of childhood” — the most popular American children’s poet of the Gilded Age, a newspaper columnist of legendary wit and mischief, and an obsessive book collector whose passion for rare editions made him the patron saint of American bibliophiles. He is remembered today primarily for two poems — “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue” — that were recited by millions of American children and that remain among the most anthologised poems in the language, but in his own time he was equally famous as a humorist, a practical joker of epic proportions, and the most influential literary columnist in Chicago.

St. Louis and Denver

Field was born in St. Louis in 1850, the son of a prominent lawyer (Roswell Martin Field had represented Dred Scott). His mother died when he was six, and he was raised by relatives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He attended Williams College, Knox College, and the University of Missouri without graduating from any of them, and began his career as a journalist in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver.

In Denver, he established his reputation as a humorous columnist and legendary prankster. His hoaxes were elaborate and sometimes dangerous — he once published a fake interview with Oscar Wilde during Wilde’s American tour that was so convincing it was reprinted in Eastern papers. He was witty, charming, profane, and perpetually broke.

Chicago and “Sharps and Flats”

In 1883, Field moved to Chicago to write the column “Sharps and Flats” for the Chicago Morning News (later the Chicago Record). The column became one of the most widely read features in American journalism — a daily miscellany of verse, humour, literary gossip, book reviews, and practical jokes that made Field the central figure of Chicago’s literary culture during the city’s great cultural boom of the 1880s and 1890s.

Field championed local writers, feuded with Eastern literary establishments, and used his column to promote the cause of public libraries and children’s literature. He was one of the first American journalists to treat children’s books as serious literature.

The Children’s Poems

“Little Boy Blue” (1888) was Field’s most famous poem — a sentimental elegy for a dead child, told from the perspective of the toys left behind (“The little toy dog is covered with dust, / But sturdy and stanch he stands”). The poem was enormously popular in an era of high infant mortality, when the death of children was a common and devastating experience.

“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” (1889) was his masterpiece — a lullaby about three children sailing in a wooden shoe through a sea of stars (“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night / Sailed off in a wooden shoe — / Sailed on a river of crystal light, / Into a sea of dew”). The poem has been reprinted in hundreds of anthologies and adapted into picture books, songs, and animations.

A Little Book of Western Verse (1889) and Love-Songs of Childhood (1894) collected the best of his poetry. A Little Book of Profitable Tales (1889) collected his Christmas stories and fairy tales.

The Bibliomaniac

Field was an obsessive book collector, and his essays on book collecting — collected posthumously in The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) — are among the most charming and most frequently quoted writings on the pleasures of the book. The essays describe the collector’s love affair with rare editions, fine bindings, association copies, and the dusty shelves of secondhand bookshops with an affection and humour that have made the book a minor classic of bibliophilic literature.

Field died suddenly of a heart attack in 1895 at the age of forty-five, leaving behind enormous debts and a collection of rare books that was sold at auction to pay them.

Collecting Field

A Little Book of Western Verse (Scribner’s, 1889) and A Little Book of Profitable Tales (Scribner’s, 1889) are the primary targets — Field’s first major collections. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (Scribner’s, 1896) is the bibliophile’s favourite. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod in various early illustrated editions is widely collected. The ten-volume Writings in Prose and Verse (Scribner’s, 1896) is the standard collected edition. Field’s own book collection, dispersed at auction, is of antiquarian interest.