Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist.

His first volume, The Laurel: An Ode (1889), betrayed the overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to the pit of mere technique. His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss Carman—the three volumes of Songs from Vagabondia (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His lines fling themselves across the page; dance with intoxicating abandon; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits. The famous Stein Song is but an interlude in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman, begins:

Hovey’s attitude to his art may be expressed in no better way than his own words concerning the poet: “It is not his mission,” wrote Hovey in the Dartmouth Magazine, “to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man—all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it.” This almost too conscious awareness of the poet’s “mission” often marred Hovey’s work; in responding to his program, he frequently overstressed his ringing enthusiasm, strained his own muscularity. But his power was as unflagging as his fraternal energy was persuasive. And in certain quieter moods the poet rose to new heights. The work on which he was engaged at the time of his death is significant; Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Five Dramas is magnificent in its restrained vitality.

Although the varied lyrics in Songs from Vagabondia are the best known examples of Hovey, a more representative collection of his riper work may be found in Along the Trail (1898). This volume contains “Spring” and the stirring “Comrades” in full as well as the best of his vivid fragments.

Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.