Mrs. Amelia B. Welby, Kentucky's most famous female poet of the
mid-century, was born at St. Michael's, Maryland, February 3, 1819.
When she was fifteen years old her family removed to Louisville,
Kentucky, the city of her fame. In 1837, George D. Prentice, with his
wonderful nose for finding female verse-makers, added Amelia to his
already long and ever-increasing list. He printed her first poem in
his _Journal_, and crowned her as the finest branch of his poetical
tree. His declaration that she possessed the divine afflatus meant
nothing, as he had said the same thing about many another sentimental
single lady, pining upon the peaks of poesy. But Edgar Allan Poe and
Rufus W. Griswold soon separated her from the versifiers and placed
her among the poets, and thus her fame has come down to us with
fragrance. In June, 1838, Amelia was married to George Welby, a
Louisville merchant, who also held her to be a poet born in the
purple. Mrs. Welby's verse became well-known and greatly admired in
many parts of the country, and, in response to numerous requests for a
volume of her work, she collected her _Journal_ verse and published it
under the title of _Poems by Amelia_ (Boston, 1845). A second edition
was published the following year, and by 1860 the volume was said to
be in its seventeenth edition! Robert W. Weir's illustrated edition of
her poems was issued in 1850, and this is the most desirable form in
which her work has been preserved. These various editions will at once
convey some idea of her great popularity. With Poe, Prentice, and
Griswold singing her praises, and the public purchasing her poems as
rapidly as they could be made into books, Amelia's fame seemed secure.
To-day, however, no one has read any of her verse save _The Rainbow_,
which has been set down as her best poem, and she has become
essentially an historical personage, the keepsake of Kentucky letters.
While the greater number of her poems are quite unreadable, her elegy
for Miss Laura M. Thurston, a sister versifier, is well done and her
finest piece of work. Mrs. Welby died at Louisville, May 3, 1852, when
but thirty-three years of age. Had she lived longer, and the poetic
appreciation of the American people suffered no change, the heights to
which she would have attained can be but vaguely guessed at.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Female Poets of America_, by R. W. Griswold
(Philadelphia, 1856); _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T.
Coggeshall (Columbus, 1860).