Talk:Langdon Smith

Deceased
This article does not concern any currently living people. It concerns only Langdon Smith, who is no longer alive. If it is found to concern any one else, then it should be altered appropirately. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.168.9.13 (talk • contribs)

Confusion of two Langdon Smiths?
I believe there may be information for two different individuals comingled in this article. I found an New York Times obituary (04/09/1908) for a Langdon Smith (referred to by friends as "Denver") who served as a war correspondent for New York newspapers in the 1890s. He was born in Kentucky on 01/04/1858 and died in New York City on 04/08/1908). He was married to Marie Antoinette Wright, who committed suicide two weeks after his death. The poet, Langdon W. Smith, apparently came to the U.S. from Scotland at age 14, and may have also died in 1908 -- he apparently got ill in New York and returned to the UK to die. Perhaps the confusion arises from the fact that the poet's poetry was published in New York newspapers around the same time the corresondent's articles were published. The confusion is summed up well at the web site Sherry Chandler. Apparently it has been decided to keep this article, but I've no idea how to go about unknotting this ambiguity. Ronald W Wise 21:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I was aware of this when I began the article. My aim was to write on the poet Langdon Smith. Perhaps we should start another article for his doppelganger, or simply add a section to this article disambiguating the two men. I have not been able to find any published sources with insightful information on the poet; this one seems a little bit lost in time and could probably use someone experienced in the field. Thanks for revamping my interest:) Chooper 21:26, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

At least 2 Langdon Smiths...
I just noticed this discussion, and there is at least one American born artist Langdon Smith with known birth and death dates, with whom the journalist and poet is confused, and perhaps a third, a naturalist born in Scotland. In my recent edits to the page I included what little I had found on the American artist Langdon Smith in a hidden comment with this info:

Langdon Smith (12 June 1870 - 9 September 1959) was an American artist.


 * A little info on him is available at :


 * [http://binggallery.com/langdon_smithmain.htm
 * [http://www.edanhughes.com/biography.cfm?ArtistID=636
 * [http://www.kargesfineart.com/langdon-smith-biography.html

I still won't have much time to do anything further on this today, and perhaps not any time soon, but most of what little info I had on the poet Langdon Smith was obtained from:
 * 1) Evolution : A Fantasy (1909) (though images might not appear in Google's page browser, the downloadable pdf contains images of all the pages).
 * 2) "Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies" by W. Joseph Campbell

I am interested in helping to clear up the confusions that exist about the 2 or 3 Langdon Smiths who have been mentioned, to the extent it is possible. ~ Kalki 13:14, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe that there is reasonably strong circumstantial evidence that the writer of ″Evolution″ was Langdon W. Smith, that is, the Smith from the UK. All actual places referenced in the poem are in the UK. I think it is less likely that an American would choose to write such a poem and only use place names from the UK. I list the references here: Pagliere (talk) 17:10, 2 July 2020 (UTC)
 * ″Caradoc drift″: Caer Caradoc is the Welsh name for a hill in Shropshire, England
 * ″Devon Springs″: Devon or Devonshire, is county in SW England
 * ″Kimmeridge clay″: The sedimentary deposit in Kimmeridge, from the Late Jurassic to the lowermost Cretaceous, in the south and east of England
 * ″Kimmeridge″: a village on the Isle of Purbeck
 * ″Purbeck flags″: The Isle of Purbeck is a peninsula on the English Channel coast, in Dorset
 * ″Coralline crags″: This is not a specific place and Coralline, a kind of algae, is distributed in all the world's oceans; this is not informative one way or another
 * ″Tremadoc beds″: Tremadoc is a village in Porthmadog, Gwynedd, in NW Wales

Associated wikiquote muddies the waters?
The External Links section points to generally accepted versions of the poem, and additional links to variants can be included there. The last paragraph of the article,


 * "Evolution" is reprinted, with helpful hyperlinks and comments, on the Wikiquote page devoted to the poem and to Smith

links to a wiki editor's variant, which further obscures what can be known about Langdon Smith's intention.

The discussion in wikiquote of the quatrain


 * For we know the clod, by the grace of God
 * Will quicken with voice and breath;
 * And we know that Love, with gentle hand
 * Will beckon from death to death

found in the 1927 Markam volume would better go in this wikipedia article itself. Though as Kalki rightly states there that there's no proof that it was or was not included by Smith in an earlier version of the poem, a textual argument can be made that this quatrain is an "improvement" by Markam in his overkill style: nowhere else in the poem is "Love" stated to be a mover of anything; nor is "Love" anywhere else capitalized. I'm not here making an argument that the foregoing interpretation should be included, only that using the quatrain in an editor's rewriting of the poem is interpretive and non-neutral. Given the doubtfulness of the quatrain, what does the wikiquote add to the understanding of the poem or Smith's intent? -- Mahnut 18:46, 6 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Differences between published versions, including the above quatrain in the Edwin Markham edition, are detailed in Martin Gardner, Best Remembered Poems, Courier Dover Publications, 1992, ISBN 048627165X, pp. 163–167; so this is definitely not, as you seem to suggest, a variant invented by a wiki contributor. It is fairly standard practice at Wikiquote to note variants published in notable works, and the annotation in the Wikiquote article seems clear enough in indicating that the provenance is unknown. Wikiquote does not engage in textual analysis or interpretation. I leave it to Wikipedia's editors to decide whether it would give undo weight to include it here, if any can be found in reliable sources. Analyzing consistency in the voice of a "one poem poet" seems, to me, a fairly bootless endeavor. ~ Ningauble (talk) 16:42, 8 August 2010 (UTC)