“No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself…” — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work about it.”

Questioning whether deliberate self-description can ever escape self-conscious distortion · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

About Thomas Bailey Aldrich

11 November 1836–19 March 1907

In the pantheon of American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still…

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Poems by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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“Save us from our friends—our enemies we can guard against.”

A wry reminder that well-intentioned friends can sometimes cause the difficulties enemies cannot · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

“The color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its affinities.”

Describing influence as an organic blending of a writer's mind with congenial ideas and voices · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

“Here art has broken into smithereens the mirror which she is supposed to hold up to nature.”

Condemning fiction whose artificiality destroys rather than illuminates its connection with life · Essay, Historical Novels, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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Thomas Bailey Aldrich — a remark

About Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Poems by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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