Richard Henry Wilde | Biography

Richard Henry Wilde (24 September 1789-10 September 1847), poet, politician, and translator, was born in Dublin, Ireland. The son of a merchant father and a socially prominent mother, Wilde saw little of Ireland because his family moved to Baltimore in 1796 in order to establish a branch of the family business there. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 wiped out the family's investments in Dublin, and they became entirely dependent upon their Baltimore store for a livelihood. From childhood Wilde suffered from poor health, which made him a shy and reclusive youngster, privately tutored as well as educated at home by his mother. Much of Wilde's time was spent reading rather than playing out of doors. In 1800 he went to work in his father's store.

Another blow struck the Wilde family in 1802, when Richard's father died, leaving but a small estate. In an attempt to bolster the family's finances, Wilde went to seek work in Augusta, Georgia. He found employment as a store clerk in Augusta, loved the town, and in 1803 the rest of his family followed him there. By 1805 his mother had opened her own dry goods shop and Wilde went to work for her. But clerking had little appeal to Wilde and in 1808 he began studying law. Also that year, in an effort to improve his speaking manner with an eye toward future courtroom appearances, he joined the local Thespian Society and Library Company. In 1809 Wilde, unsure of his abilities, crossed over to South Carolina to take the bar examination to avoid any embarrassment at home if he failed. He passed with high grades. Wilde practiced successfully in Augusta and from 1811 to 1813 served as Attorney General for his district.

Wilde became active in politics and from 1815 to 1817 served in the United States House of Representatives, where he became friends with Henry Clay and worked on the judiciary committee. He returned to Augusta after completing his term, practiced law,and, in 1819, married an attractive widow, Mrs. Caroline Buckle. In 1827 his wife died, leaving him with two sons (another had died earlier in infancy) and a stepdaughter. Also in 1827 Wilde was again elected to Congress and he served in the House until 1835, when his antagonism toward Andrew Jackson led to his defeat for reelection.

In 1835 Wilde was able to realize his lifelong dream--a trip to Europe. Thus he hoped to regain his health, forget politics, and study languages, especially Italian. He arrived in London in June and that September he entered Italy. Soon after he fell in love with Florence, where he settled and pursued his researches. His works on Italian literature are all a product of this period. Though Wilde's Italian trip was primarily an intellectual experience, he also became a part of the local social scene, meeting and befriending such people as the artists Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, the statesmen Charles Summer and Edward Everett, and Frances Appleton, who later became Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's second wife. Wilde returned to America in 1841 to work on his lives of Torquato Tasso and Dante and, though he wished to return to Italy, business interests kept him from ever going back.

Wilde resumed his residence in Augusta and put aside his literary studies to practice law in order to earn enough money to put his sons through college. But business in Augusta proved poor and in January 1847 he arrived in New Orleans, where he hoped to establish a larger and more profitable practice. He was moderately successful but, always susceptible to illness, he fell victim to a yellow fever epidemic and died on 10 September 1847. At his death he left unfinished his life of Dante and his translations of "The Italian Lyric Poets." The manuscripts of both works are now at the Library of Congress.

Wilde's first book--and the only one published in his lifetime--was Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso (1842). Hailed by contemporary reviewers--including Margaret Fuller, who, in the January 1842 Dial , called it "to the attention of all, who have time to think and feel"--the work still holds interest today; a recent critic, Edd Winfield Parks, has commented that it "reveals a care in marshalling evidence, a scrupulous use of documents, and a facility in translating." Hesperion, edited by Wilde's son and published twenty years after his death, is a nationalistic poem of four cantos celebrating Florida, Virginia, Acadia, and Louisiana. His work on the unpublished "The Life and Times of Dante with Sketches of the State of Florence and of His Friends and Enemies" has been described thus by Theodore Koch, who examined the manuscript: "Wilde never reached the point of trained scholarship and discrimination necessary to the investigator and historian." The most important result of Wilde's Dante researches was his assistance in discovering a lost Giotto portrait of Dante on the walls of the Bargello in Florence. But Wilde is best remembered for a single poem, "My Life is Like the Summer Rose," written partially to commemorate the death of his brother in a duel, and first published in the April 1819 Analectic Magazine. It was reprinted many times, and John Greenleaf Whittier thought it a "perfect" poem. Even today, Jay B. Hubbell feels it is "one of the best of American fugitive poems."