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Madge Morris Wagner (née Morris; 1862-1924) was an American poet and journalist associated with The Golden Era. She was a contemporary and friend of Clara Shortridge Foltz and Frona Eunice Wait.
Madge Morris was born April 25, 1862, on the Great Plains when her parents were enroute to California. She was a descendant of Capt. Morris, who built Fort Morris, in Virginia
She was educated in the common schools.
Early on, Wagner became a journalist and poet. Her early work in verse was begun in San Jose, California. There she served as reporter and special writer on J. J. Owen's Daily Mercury, with many of her stanzas appearing there, too. Her notability dates to an order given her, half in jest, by Owen to go to the top of the 180 feet (55 m) electric tower at Market and Santa Clara streets, and write a poem on the panorama of Santa Clara Valley to be seen from that dangerous height. Madge took the order seriously. In those days, there was a big bucket run with a windlass which took the electrician up to inspect the lanterns on top. Climbing into this bucket, she was hauled up the tower. Here, unfazed by the dizzy height, she wrote:
"I stood on the topmost tower,
And never again till I die,
Shall I glimpse such a wondrous dower
As came in that vision high."
Her patriotic poem "Liberty Bell" led to the construction of the Columbian Liberty Bell. With this, Wagner reached the acme of her notability when, in 1893, because of her poem, she and William McDowell, who conceived a great bell for the World's Columbian Exposition, were voted by the Chicago authorities the freedom of the city.
From 1885 to 1895, she was the editor of The Golden Era, to which Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Mark Twain were constant contributors. Wagner is the author of Débris, a Book of Poems (San Francisco, 1881); Mystery of Carmel, and other Poems (1885); and a novel, The Titled Plebeian (1890).
A quest for health and a love for western arid lands took Wagner to the Colorado desert where she wrote deeply emotional sons. Her lyrics caught the attention of the editor of Lippincott's Magazine, and she was persuaded to write for this periodical. Among her contributions was "The Colorado Desert". In technique "The Colorado Desert" is not conventional verse - it has no symmetry of either line or rhyme, nor is it free verse. In construction, there is a single-alternate rhymed quatrain, then a rhymed couplet. But this scheme is not continued in the succeeding six lines. A blank couplet follows after this. Here, a line shortens to four accents; there, another draws itself out to six. The whole is was characterized as weird and broken, yet beautifully poetic. Wait characterized it as "the best poem ever written by a California woman".
In the prime of her life, she lived in a cottage in Joaquin Miller Park, later named the Madge Morris Wagner Lodge.
References
- ^ Wait Colburn, Frona Eunice (May 1924). "A California Poetess - As I Knew Her". Overland Monthly and The Out West Magazine. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
- ^ Wilson, James Grant; Fiske, John (1901). Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. D. Appleton. p. 273. Retrieved 13 January 2025 – via Wikisource. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
- ^ Bland, Henry Meade (May 1924), Madge Morris Wagner, Overland Monthly and The Out West Magazine, p. 204