RARE "American Poet" Park Benjamin Sr Cut Signature Mounted For Sale

Up for sale a VERY RARE! "American Poet" Park Benjamin Sr Clipped Signature Mounted On An Album Page. 

ES-4666E 

Park Benjamin Sr. (August 14, 1809

– September 12, 1864) was well known in his time as an American poet,

journalist, editor and founder of several newspapers. He was born in Demerara, British Guiana, August 14, 1809, but was early sent to New England, and graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. He

practiced law in Boston, but abandoned it

for editorial work there and later in New York. On July 8, 1839, he joined

with Rufus Wilmot Griswold to

produce The Evening Tattler, a journal which promised "the

sublimest songs of the great poets–the eloquence of the most renowned

orators–the heart-entrancing legends of love and chivalry–the laughter-loving

jests of all lands". In addition to fiction and poetry, it also published

foreign news, local gossip, jokes, and New York police reports. In 1840 Benjamin helped to found The New World and

after other brief editorial ventures became a lecturer, public reader, and

periodical writer. He was sued for libel by James Fenimore Cooper, and

was on personal terms with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. By the time his first son, Park Benjamin Jr., was born, he had settled down to quiet

retirement in Long Island. His son went

on to become a writer as well as a patent lawyer and physician. Benjamin died,

after a brief illness, on September 12, 1864.  Edgar Allan Poe had mixed feelings about

Benjamin, calling his writing "lucid, terse, and pungent" and his

character "witty, often cuttingly sarcastic, but seldom humorous". Walt Whitman, for a time one of Benjamin's employees and

protégés, hated his poetry outright.[4] In the 20th century, Park Benjamin Sr. was

virtually forgotten. He is now known only through his shorter poems, of which

"The Old

Sexton" is often anthologized.