George Cabot Lodge
George Cabot Lodge was a notable American poet and a member of a prominent Massachusetts family with ancestral ties to the Mayflower. Born to Henry Cabot Lodge and Anna Cabot Mills Lodge, he grew up in an influential environment, eventually moving to Washington, D.C. due to his father’s political career. Lodge attended Harvard University, where he developed a passion for poetry and literature, influenced by friendships with intellectual figures such as Trumbull Stickney and Theodore Roosevelt. Despite a lackluster academic record, he pursued a literary career, producing works that garnered recognition, including his poetry collection, *The Song of the Wave, and Other Poems*, published in 1898.
Lodge’s life was marked by experiences such as serving as a gunnery officer during the Spanish-American War and working as a correspondent in Berlin. He married Elizabeth Freylinghuysen Davis and had two children. Lodge's engagement with literature included founding the Conservative Christian Anarchist Party with Stickney, through which he explored various literary forms, including verse dramas. Tragically, his promising career was cut short when he passed away from a heart attack in 1909 at age 38, leaving a legacy as a minor poet whose work foreshadowed the contributions of later literary figures like T. S. Eliot.
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George Cabot Lodge
Poet
- Born: October 10, 1873
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Died: August 21, 1909
Biography
George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge and Anna Cabot Mills Lodge, could trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower and belonged to one of Massachusetts’s oldest and most influential families. He attended the Noble School in Boston until his father was elected to Congress in 1886, and the family moved from Boston to Washington, D.C. There he attended the Emerson Institute before he entered Harvard University in 1891.
His education, however, was not confined to his college years. His father’s friends included such luminaries as William Sturgis Bigelow, a student of Buddhism and collector of Japanese art, and Theodore Roosevelt, and Lodge knew and benefitted from their assistance. At Harvard, the handsome Lodge had a mediocre record and was once on academic probation but his friendship with Trumbull Stickney, one of the brightest of his classmates, led him to begin writing poetry and prompted him to pursue his study of French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. His decision was based in part on the success of his first poetic efforts, which Roosevelt helped him get published, and his decision to pursue an intellectual life, like Bigelow, rather than a business and political life, like his father, who was a writer before he became a politician.
After spending a degree-less year at the Sorbonne, Lodge returned briefly to the United States before leaving for Berlin. He served as the Berlin correspondent for the New York Sun but when one of his articles was heavily edited, he quit the job and in 1897 returned to the United States. He then became his father’s private secretary, a post he held until his father died. During the Spanish-American War, he was a gunnery officer on the Davis and served with distinction. In 1898, his The Song of the Wave, and Other Poems, consisting of seventy-five poems tied to his years in Cambridge, Paris, and Berlin, was published and brought him recognition as a promising poet. Two years later, he married Elizabeth Freylinghuysen Davis at a small ceremony at the Church of the Advent in Boston. The couple had two children, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Helena Lodge.
The Genius of the Commonplace (1902), his first verse drama, was based, like most of his writing, on the ideas he and Stickney incorporated into the Conservative Christian Anarchist Party they founded in 1896. The party, at once light-hearted and serious, consisted of two members, and when Stickney opted out, he was replaced by Henry Adams, who wrote Lodge’s biography in 1911. The Genius of the Commonplace appeared in 1902, and Cain: A Drama was published in 1903, the year that Stickney died. With the help of his brother, John Ellerton Lodge, and William Vaughan Moody, Lodge edited Stickney’s poems in 1905. The next year he delivered the Phi beta Kappa poem at Harvard, and in 1908 his verse drama Herakles was published. At a time when his poetic future seemed bright, he became ill and died of a heart attack in 1909. Like Stickney, he died before his time, and he will go down in literary history as a minor poet, a “Harvard poet,” and an alienated figure whose poetry precedes that of T. S. Eliot, a kindred spirit.