Clarence
Urmy wrote poems in the Sierra Nevada beside the Yuba River, and
settled in San Jose by the banks of the Guadalupe. In the late 1890s
and early 1900s his work appeared in the pages of The
Atlantic Monthly, Overland Monthly, The Century, Munsey’s,
Cosmopolitan, Sunset, The Smart Set, The Independent, Lippincott’s,
Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Youth’s
Companion. The author says, “Even when a poet must earn a
living (which Urmy did as musician and teacher and eventually as
critic and professor) his first thought in the morning and last at
night is about his chosen work.” In the offices of the San
Jose Mercury Herald hardened newspapermen who had known him
were capable of reciting Clarence Urmy's poems from memory.
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