Will Carleton

Will Carleton (William McKendree Carleton, 1845–1912) was an American poet from Michigan, whose verse most often drew on rural life. His ballads of farm and village speech, in the plain dialect of ordinary people, made him one of the most widely read popular poets of the United States in his day, and 'Over the Hill to the Poor-House' is the best known of them.

City Ballads (1885), one of the two books given here (with Farm Ballads, 1873), turns the same eye on the city. It is framed as the diaries of two country people newly arrived in New York, a young student, Arthur Selwyn, and an old farmer, Harrington, whose dated entries and inset ballads look at wealth, want, fire, water, vice, virtue, travel and home.