Richard Watson Gilder Biography | Poet

GILDER, RICHARD WATSON (1844-1909), American editor and poet, was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, on the 8th of February 1844, a brother of William Henry Gilder (1838-1900), the Arctic explorer. He was educated at Bellevue Seminary, an institution conducted by his father, the Rev. William Henry Gilder (1812-1864), in Flushing, Long Island. After three years (1865-1868) on the Newark, New Jersey, Daily Advertiser, he founded, with Newton Crane, the Newark Morning Register. In 1869 he became editor of Hours at Home, and in 1870 assistant editor of Scribner’s Monthly (eleven years later re-named The Century Magazine), of which he became editor in 1881. He was one of the founders of the Free Art League, of the International Copyright League, and of the Authors’ Club; was chairman of the New York Tenement House Commission in 1894; and was a prominent member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of the Council of the National Civil Service Reform League, and of the executive committee of the Citizens’ Union of New York City. His poems, which are essentially lyrical, have been collected in various volumes, including Five Books of Song (1894), In Palestine and other Poems (1898), Poems and Inscriptions (1901), and In the Heights (1905). A complete edition of his poems was published in 1908. He also edited ”Sonnets from the Portuguese” and other Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; ”One Word More” and other Poems by Robert Browning (1905). He died in New York on the 18th of November 1909. His wife, Helena de Kay, a grand-daughter of Joseph Rodman Drake, assisted, with Saint Gaudens and others, in founding the Society of American Artists, now merged in the National Academy, and the Art Students’ League of New York. She translated Sensier’s biography of Millet, and painted, before her marriage in 1874, studies in flowers and ideal heads, much admired for their feeling and delicate colouring.