(Alfred) Joyce Kilmer was born at New Brunswick, New Jersey, December 6, 1886. He was graduated from Rutgers College in 1904 and received his A.B. from Columbia in 1906. After leaving Columbia he became, in rapid succession, instructor of Latin at Morristown High School, editor of a journal for horsemen, book salesman, book-reviewer, lexicographer, Æsthete, interviewer, socialist and churchman.

After Kilmer became converted to Catholicism, his conception of the church was the Church Militant. “His thought,” writes his biographer, Robert Cortes Holliday, “dwelt continually on warrior-saints.... As he saw it, there was no question as to his duty.” In 1917 Kilmer joined the Officers’ Reserve Training Corps, but he soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after America entered the world war, he enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. Shortly before the regiment left New York for Spartanburg, South Carolina, Kilmer was transferred at his own request to the 165th Infantry. In spite of his avowed militancy, Kilmer was “a poet trying to be a soldier;” he made no effort to glorify war; his one hope was to wring some spiritual satisfaction out of the brutality.

On July 28, 1918, the five-day battle for the mastery of the heights beyond the river Ourcq was begun. Two days later, Sergeant Kilmer was killed in action.

Death came before the poet had developed or even matured his gifts. His first volume, Summer of Love (1911), is wholly imitative; it is full of reflections of a dozen other sources, “a broken bundle of mirrors.” Trees and Other Poems (1914) contains the title-poem by which Kilmer is best known and, though various influences are still strong (one cannot miss the borrowed accents of Patmore, Belloc, Chesterton, Housman and—vide “Martin”—E. A. Robinson), a refreshing candor lights up the lines. Main Street and Other Poems (1917) is less derivative; the simplicity is less self-conscious, the ecstasy more spontaneous.

Besides his own poetry, Kilmer edited a selection of Verses by Hilaire Belloc (1916) and Dreams and Images, An Anthology of Catholic poets (1917).