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Posted on 11/22/2018 10:06:17 AM PST by mairdie
"The Acknowledgment" (1787), a humorous poem by Henry Livingston, Jr., the author of "Night Before Christmas." The humor is probably why it's one of my favorites. To "Lovely Nancy," from Henry Livingston's Music Manuscript. Illustrated by vintage postcards. Henry's poems are read by Byron Nilsson, who played Henry at the "Trial Before Christmas." The most Happy Thanksgiving to all.
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Who knew?
We’ve been trying to let people know since 2000. Would have been easier if someone wasn’t trying to sell a handwritten copy of the poem and hired someone to write an article attacking us. He did eventually sell his copy.
I’m in the Moore camp. Livingston doesn’t have any more substantial a claim than Moore, and tradition gives authorship to Moore. So there I’ll stay.
And I reviewed the evidence before I decided.
The best proofs we’ve gathered is the statistical analysis of elements of the body of poetry of Moore and Henry. What we did was treat Moore, Henry and NBC Author as 3 separate entities. Then we analyzed the favorite patterns of Moore and Henry. This was so extreme that we analyzed the movement of the tongue in the mouth when reciting the words aloud. When we next examined the patterns of NBC Author, they matched Henry’s and were outside of Moore’s.
The problem for proponents of Henry is that publishers refuse to let them publish books that list only Henry as the author because of the fear of that reducing the number of copies sold. But what so many authors tell me is that they do believe Henry to be the author.
The main opponent was hit by a massive financial blast when Don’s book came out in 2000. He hired a paranormal investigator to write a counter article. Don had been sloppy in a few places and a few of the man’s points were valid. Very few. Mac is an emeritus professor and big in the field of authorship attribution. His research covered multiple years of investigation and proved statistically that NBC fit perfectly within Henry’s body of work and was completely outside of Moore’s body of work. This is a lot more authoritative than the literary analysis which Don did in 2000. Don worked on the topic for about a year. Mac for about 3 years.
Multiple scholars, over the years, have believed in Henry’s claim over Moore’s. These include the president of Vassar and a professor from Pennsylvania. I believe the online poetry collection has changed the attribution from Moore to Henry based on Don’s research.
The simplest argument is just to read the work of each man. The mind that wrote Moore’s poetry is, to me, incapable of the spirit that is intrinsic in NBC.
Then read Henry. The man soars and laughs and imagines in a way that you don’t expect for someone writing in the late 18th century. There is nothing ordinary or mediocre in Henry’s writing. Moore exemplified boring and unpleasantness. As he wrote in the poem to his baby daughter, “How sad to have left your stocking quite empty.”
Additionally, in my last pass collecting poems to analyze, I’ve come across two poems that statistically are shown to be by Henry that are variants of one another - and that use another night visitor awakening the narrator, though this time the visitor is French and a character from a nightmare.
Your scholarship does not impress me.
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