He forged introductions, blurbs, letters, and critical reviews to reflect magnanimously on his six volumes of poetry, most of which was vanity-pressed during his sixty years of versifying. Iris’s lofty-themed poems were insipid and often plagiarized he convinced himself of his genius, then spun literary repute out of whole cloth. What’s amazing about Iris is not how infantile his poetry was (a sentimentalist, he hewed to the Hallmark tradition in the age of free verse), but how his fakery kept him in print. If the poet could sing of democracy and motherhood, of religious awakening and moral virtue, then a modest career in writing poetry-forget selling insurance-might be had.Įnter Scharmel Iris (1889-1967), an extremely minor (Is less than minor possible?) Italian-born Chicago poet, whose writing life was both a fraud and a failure. In the early twentieth century, pro rhymesters like Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edgar A. Long before the tushy University job for American poets there was a time when a few wrote verse for popular taste, published in newspapers, and eked out a living. Study of Fraud Poet Gives Him More Than His Due Review: Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris by Craig Abbott
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