Tributes: The Poetry of Emmeline Grangerford

EMMELINE GRANGERFORD

Tributes: The Poetry of Emmeline Grangerford

Hickman, KY

Privately Printed

1840

First mentioned in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Elegies for the dead, written by a fourteen-year-old girl, a daughter of the Grangerford family and a past master of “obituary poetry.” Said Twain, “Every time...a child died, she would be on hand with her ‘tribute’ before he was cold. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker.”
She herself referred to the poems as “Tributes.” The most famous is the great “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d.”