Cale Young Rice

Cale Young Rice built his career as an American poet and verse dramatist whose books joined lyrical travel impressions to sustained dramatic form. David; A Tragedy, issued by McClure, Phillips in 1904, reshapes the biblical conflict around Saul's court, placing David among Jonathan, Michal, Samuel, and rivals for political power. Its formal scenes and elevated dialogue show Rice treating scripture as theater rather than simple retelling. Many Gods, published by Doubleday, Page in 1910, moves across a different scale. The poetry collection ranges from Japan and the Himalayas to Egypt, India, the Arabian Gulf, and the American West, using travel, landscape, belief, and mortality as recurring subjects. Project Gutenberg records both works and preserves the original semicolon on the title page of David; A Tragedy. Read together, the books show Rice alternating between a concentrated historical drama and a geographically expansive sequence of poems while maintaining his interest in faith, destiny, and human choice.