Biography
Julia Ann Moore, the "Sweet Singer of Michigan", born Julia Ann Davis in Plainfield Township, Kent County, Michigan (December 1, 1847-June 5, 1920], was an American poet, or more precisely, poetaster.
Some comparison to William McGonagall is worth making. Unlike McGonagall, Moore commanded a fairly wide variety of meters and forms, albeit like Emily Dickinson the majority of her verse is in the ballad meter. Like McGonagall, she held a maidenly bluestocking's allegiance to the Temperance movement, and frequently indited odes to the joys of sobriety. Most importantly, like McGonagall, she was drawn to themes of accident, disaster, and sudden death; as has been said of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, in her pages you can count the dead and wounded. Edgar Wilson Nye called her "worse than a Gatling gun".
Her chief claim to contemporary note, however, is that she inspired Mark Twain to create the character of Emmeline Grangerford in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Grangerford's funereal ode to Stephen Dowling Botts.
Moore was also the inspiration for comic poet Ogden Nash, as he acknowledged in his first book, and whose daughter reported that her work convinced Nash to become a "great bad poet" instead of a "bad good poet". ..
