George Cabot Lodge

George Cabot "Bay" Lodge (October 10, 1873 – August 21, 1909) was an American poet and politician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Life

Lodge was born in Boston on October 10, 1873. His father was Henry Cabot Lodge, a politician who eventually represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. His mother was Anna Cabot Mills Davis. He was named after his great-great-grandfather, U.S. Senator George Cabot.

Lodge began studies at Harvard College, and continued them in France and Berlin into his mid-twenties. At Harvard, he was a member of the Harvard Polo Club.

In 1897, Lodge began work as a secretary to both his father and a U.S. Senate committee in Washington. He later served successfully in the Spanish–American War as a naval cadet. Lodge was a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who penned a fond introduction for the posthumous 1911 collection Poems and Dramas of George Cabot Lodge. He was best known for his delicate sonnets, such as the Song of the Wave, Essex, and Trumbull Stickney (Stickney was a friend and admirer), several of which were anthologized. His style and artistic outlook were deeply affected by the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Giacomo Leopardi, as well as French influences including Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle.

In 1900, he married Mathilda Frelinghuysen Davis, with whom he had three children. Their sons Henry and John became politicians, rising to the offices of U.S. senator from Massachusetts and governor of Connecticut, respectively.

He died of heart failure while vacationing on Tuckernuck Island, near Nantucket, on August 21, 1909. A biography, The Life of George Cabot Lodge (1911), was written by his friend and confidant Henry Adams. His collected poems and dramas, in two volumes, were published in 1911 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article George Cabot Lodgey, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0. ( view authors).