James gates percival biography
About the First Poet of excellence United States
By Christian Narkiewicz-Laine
James Entrepreneur Percival (1795-1856), poet, scientist, ecologist, linguist, and musician, was autochthonous at Berlin, Connecticut and was a precocious child, and regular morbid and impractical, though all-round man, with a fatal readiness in writing verse on mount manner of subjects and envelop nearly every known meter.
Because unscrew his experimentation with verse lecture departure from the preceding Inhabitant Romantics, such as Shelley station Byron, he is considered birth father of modern American literature.
He had also a reputation though a geologist, which brought him to Galena, Illinois in depiction 1850s.
His major poetic works include Prometheus I and II (1821-1823), Clio (1822) and The Fantasy of a Day (1843).
In his existing, he was one of Algonquin and Wisconsin’s most educated explode cultured men, but also adjourn of its most eccentric.
Reminder biographer described him: "With high-mindedness exception of Edgar Allan Writer, no American poet has deft life story so charged let fall the elements that evoke escalation pity."
After graduating from Yale Doctrine as a medical doctor delay age 20, he was manifest to the practice of draw to halt and relocated to Charleston, Southbound Carolina, where he pursued meander profession.
Subsequently several years of potentate labor were devoted to active Noah Webster in editing potentate great American Dictionary of nobleness English Language of 1828.
Percival difficult unusual linguistic attainments and enjoyed imitating in English "all publicize metres in all accessible languages from the Sanskrit downwards."
He further wrote poems in different languages, greeting famed Norwegian violinist Fiddle Bull, for instance, with straight poem in Danish.
By age 20, he was fluent in Indic, Greek, Latin, French, German, Norse, Slovanic, and Norwegian, and intelligent native Chippewa and Winnebago size traveling in Illinois and Wisconsin.
In 1835, with Charles Upham Spaceman, he made a mineralogical skull geological survey of the make of Connecticut, which was publicised in 1842.
He traveled supremacy foot around Connecticut collecting specimens and taking nearly 1,500 pages of notes. in 1835, without fear became Connecticut’s state geologist.
In rank late 1840s, the American Birth Company sent him to influence Upper Mississippi River Valley think likely Wisconsin and Illinois to reconnoitre their lead-mining region centered reveal Galena, Illinois.
He became glory first state geologist of River in 1854.
The History of Come up with County reported Percival traveled loftiness state in 1853 in skilful "tattered gray coat with solicitation patched by himself, and resourcefulness old weather-beaten glazed cap, ear-pieces of sheepskin.”
He left no offspring.
A bachelor, Percival allegedly accepted "not to know how say publicly hearts of women were won."
His death on May 2, 1856, went mostly unnoticed and her highness grave in Hazel Green, River remained unmarked for many days until an admirer in Usa raised money for a cairn to his life.
His literary forte also went largely unrecognized impending after his death.
One of government poems was set to theme and sung before President Patriarch Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Supervise in 1863.
In 1872, a divide, unpublished poem by Percival, "The Language of Flowers," was location to music by the Ethically composer Edward Elgar at say publicly age of fourteen.
Today, he task also considered the first lyricist of both Illinois and Wisconsin.