ABSTRACT
George P. Morris (1802-1864) spread popular literature and song across the Northeast through the pages of the New York Mirror, which he edited with N. P. Willis from 1822 through 1837, and later the New Mirror, Evening Mirror, Mirror Library (reprinting popular literary pieces from the weekly and daily Mirror and low-priced edi tions of contemporary British poets), and from 1846 the Home Jour nal. After Joseph Dennie, he became the field marshal of the move ment for a national literature, which he served, as Willis wrote in Graham’s Magazine (April, 1845), by becoming “the best-known poet of the country by acclamation, not by criticism . . . breast-high in the common stream of sympathy.” Morris’s most widely acclaimed poem was “Woodsman Spare That Tree”; others covered subjects as diverse as navy life and the western frontier. Working life was celebrated in “Song of the Sewing Machine” and the City Corporation of New York requested “Croton Ode” to commemorate the completion of the city’s major aquaduct.
