Markham, Edwin

MARKHAM, EDWIN (1852–1940). Born in Oregon City, Oregon, the youngest of nine children and originally named Charles Edward Anson, Edwin Markham was the son of a mother who was a religious fanatic and a father who denied his paternity. Shortly after his parents’ divorce, Markham and his mother moved to central California. Before he was twelve he had become a farm laborer, tended sheep, and had received a few months of schooling. In his early twenties he graduated from Christian College in Santa Rosa.

Markham became a school teacher and principal, entered into an unhappy nine-year marriage, began reading widely in Christian socialism, and published his first poems. Following the death of his mother in 1891 he changed his name to Edwin, entered San Francisco’s literary life, and again experienced an unhappy, but brief, marriage. During these years he was an intimate member of a group of poets and authors which included Joaquin Miller, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce.

In January 1899, the San Francisco Examiner published Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” lavishly illustrated and set in special type. Based upon Jean-François Millet’s painting of a tired, work-worn French peasant which had deeply moved Markham when he first viewed it several years earlier, the poem eloquently articulated Markham’s Christian socialism. It became an instant success in socialist circles, cost Markham his friendship with the conservative Bierce, and brought him international recognition. In impassioned blank verse Markham described a peasant “bowed by the centuries,” carrying “on his back the burden of the world,” who is so “distorted and soul-quenched” by backbreaking and mind-numbing labor that he is “dead to rapture and despair” and a “brother to the ox.” “Oh masters, lords and rulers in all lands,” warned the poet, “How will it be with kingdoms … with those who shaped him to the thing he is … when this dumb Terror shall reply to God after the silence of the centuries?” Almost immediately in the United States and in Europe the poem became a powerful and emotionally charged symbol of worker exploitation. There were no takers to railroad magnate Collis Huntington’s offer of a $5,000 honorarium to any poet who might refute the poem in equally effective verse. The poem was ultimately translated into forty languages, appeared virtually in every socialist publication in the world, was issued in special printings, and continues as a staple in poetry anthologies to this day.

Now Markham was freed financially to become a full-time poet. In 1900, married for the third time, this time happily, he moved to Staten Island, New York, where he became active in the city’s literary life. In 1901 he published “Lincoln, Man of the People,” his only other poem to match “The Man with the Hoe” in originality of expression, although not in popularity. He was a founder of the New York Poetry Society (now the Poetry Society of America) in 1910, and in 1914 he incorporated several articles he had written into Children of Bondage, a strongly worded indictment of child labor. Markham continued publishing his poems, but overall his work was undistinguished. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was a popular lecturer before socialist audiences until failing health led eventually to his death.

Ermiston, Susan, and Linda Cirino. Literary New York: A History and Guide. New York: Gibbs-Smith, 1995.

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, and Nancy Joyce Peters, eds. Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1980.

Markham, Edwin. The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems. New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899.

Starr, Kevin. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Stidger, William. Edwin Markham. New York: Abingdon Press, 1933.

Edwin Markham Papers. Finding Guide. Dartmouth Library Archives and Manuscripts. https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/repositories/2/resources/1830

Edward Markham Archive: Correspondence. Wagner College. https://wagnercollections.omeka.net/markham