George Pope Morris

George Pope Morris was a nineteenth-century American poet, songwriter, editor, and journalist. Born in Philadelphia in 1802, he became closely associated with New York literary publishing and helped establish the New-York Mirror, an influential periodical that printed poetry, fiction, criticism, and cultural news. The Deserted Bride is the title poem of his 1838 collection The Deserted Bride and Other Poems, gathering lyrical work from a writer also remembered for songs such as Woodman, Spare That Tree! Morris later worked with Nathaniel Parker Willis on additional publishing ventures, including the Home Journal. His career joined popular verse to the practical work of editing and circulating new American writing. The Deserted Bride belongs to the earlier phase of that career and shows the sentimental lyric mode through which Morris reached a broad nineteenth-century readership before later anthologies kept several of his poems and songs in circulation.