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Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). After a brief clerkship, he became junior literary critic of The Evening Mirror at nineteen, publishing his first book (The Bells), an immature collection of echoes, at the same time. From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. But though Aldrich mingled with the New York group, he was not part of it; he longed for the more rarefied intellectual atmosphere of New England and when, in 1866, Osgood offered him the editorship of Every Saturday, published in Boston, Aldrich accepted with alacrity. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890.

Aldrich’s work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances; the reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. There is no real air in these verses; it is Nature as conceived by a poet reading the Arabian Nights in a hot-house. In company with Stoddard and Taylor, he dwelt in a literary Orientalism—(Stoddard’s Book of the East followed fast upon Taylor’s Poems of the Orient)—and Aldrich’s Cloth of Gold was suffused with similar “vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles” (to quote Holmes), laboring hard to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome profusion of lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses, diaphanous gauzes, etc.

The second phase of Aldrich’s art is more human in appeal as it is surer in artistry. He learned to sharpen his images, to fashion his smallest lyrics with a remarkable finesse. “In the little steel engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent,” writes Percy H. Boynton, “there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid.” Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, these poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are some of the epigrams, the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, passionless in tone but exquisite in design.

The best of Aldrich’s diffuse poetry has been collected in an inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. He died in 1907.