Custer, and Other Poems

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was the most widely read poet in America at the turn of the twentieth century, and this collection captures her at her most ambitious. The title poem, 'Custer,' is a sweeping narrative epic of over three thousand lines that traces George Armstrong Custer's journey from West Point cadet to Civil War hero to his final stand at Little Bighorn in 1876. Wilcox writes with the grand patriotic fervor of her era, rendering Custer as a tragic knight-errant whose brave death became a founding myth of the American West. The surrounding poems demonstrate her range: intimate lyrics on love and loss, meditative verses on nature and mortality, and patriotic pieces that reflect the nationalism of post-Civil War America. These are poems that belong to their moment yet reveal how that moment understood heroism, sacrifice, and the making of national legends. For readers interested in how Americans once told their own stories, in the grand poetic traditions that preceded modernism, this collection offers an unapologetic portal into a vanished sensibility.