William Peterfield Trent | autograph manuscript of Twilight of the Manikins, 1915-1919

William Peterfield Trent

Autograph manuscript of 'Twilight of the Manikins', [New York], 1915-1919

208 pages, 8vo, manuscript disguised in bound book titled 'The Long Gallery' by Eva Lathbury, upper joint cracked

Trent, the founder of the Sewanee Review, was a professor of English Literature at Columbia when he wrote these poems. Poems by the author had appeared in The Literary Digest, The New York Times, Fatherland, and The Texas Review in 1915, but that appears to be the extent of his published writings. Many of the poems are either pro-German, balanced against anti-German hysteria, or simply anti-British. The poems read like a diary of his personal views of the war that day (some are dated), and many of them are bitter in tone, for example: (page 125) a poem on American Ladies bewailing the loss of babies, unless they are German, and being starved by Kitchener; (page 98) the death of Kitchener by drowning, suggesting that he deserved it. Trent appears to have had no specific German ancestry, and he knew Woodrow Wilson as a fellow undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Few of the poems in this book were published. He has pasted in two that were, both pro Germany/Austria. The fact that the manuscript is disguised in a bound book suggests that he intended to keep the contents private. There are collections of Trent's papers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Yale and Columbia.