Langdon Elwyn Mitchell

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell (1862–1935), born in Philadelphia, was an American poet and playwright, the son of the physician and writer S. Weir Mitchell. His first book of verse, Sylvian, a Tragedy, and Poems (1885), appeared under the pen name John Philip Varley; his Poems followed in 1894, and he later wrote for the stage, notably The New York Idea (1906).

The poems here are taken from Edmund Clarence Stedman’s An American Anthology, 1787–1900 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900) and, for “To a Writer of the Day”, from his Poems (1894).