HOOPER, Lucy

Born 4 February 1816, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 1 August 1841, Brooklyn, New York

Wrote under: L. H.

Daughter of Joseph Hooper

From an early age, Lucy Hooper's educational and creative development was supervised and encouraged by her father. She was educated in botany, chemistry, French, Spanish, Latin, and English literature. In 1831 after her father's death, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Hooper soon began contributing to the Long Island Star and the New Yorker. A devoted member of the Episcopal church, she wrote a prize-winning essay, "Domestic Happiness," and two other pieces on religion and virtue for Dunning's collection, Domestic Happiness Portrayed (1831). Hooper's last year was spent editing The Lady's Book of Flowers and Poetry (1842), a compendium of botanical information, poems, and illustrations, but she died of pulmonary consumption before its publication.

Hooper's more serious poems develop religious themes. "The Daughter of Herodias," selected by William Cullen Bryant for inclusion in his volume of American poetry, recounts Salome's sorrow and remorse on bearing the head of John the Baptist to her unpitying mother. Salome's horror of death, her loss of innocence, and her forlorn desire for forgiveness are conveyed through the distraught voice of a young woman recounting "wild dreams of judgment and offended Heaven." The skillful mixture of pentameter and trimeter lines and the unconventional rhyme pattern enhance this strange vision. In "The Queen's Petition," Hooper effectively uses blank verse to retell the story of Esther. Here the narrator abandons the "pages of old romance" to turn to the "inspired volume" where love between a man and a woman can become the means of a people's salvation.

Along with these two poems, contemporaries tended to favor such pieces as "Time, Faith, Energy," "It is Well," "The Summons of Death," and "Life and Death," all of which assure the reader that, in time, death will offer comfort and retribution for the hardships and sorrows of life.

Too often Hooper allows her poetry to fall to the level of conventionally inconsequential romantic verse. Her editor recalls that she rarely revised, but her gift for easy meters and rhymes is not always a happy one. Her frequent use of variations on the ballad stanza relegates much of her output to light verse. She is too content to settle for facile rhymes such as "light/night" and "bloom/doom," and tends to rely on trite refrains, such as "Lady, 'twas a dream," to hold together her poems of knights and their ladies, of death and faithful love.

Hooper's prose is usually overtly didactic. "Scenes from Real Life," for instance, is devoted to revealing the folly of such sins as pride and greed and to praising the attributes of loyalty, good taste, and reverence. One tale does show promise of a more original imagination. "Reminiscence of a Clergyman" presents the interesting moral dilemma of a man who, presumed lost at sea, returns after many years to find his wife now happily married to his brother. Having established this situation, however, Hooper is satisfied to have the man find peace by relying on the future happiness guaranteed in the next world.

A contemporary critic evaluated Hooper's work in what still appear to be valid terms. He wrote: "She was known to be capable of much more than she had ever accomplished. She chose, however, to make no struggle for fame; but preferred to sing occasionally a spontaneous song, and scatter flowers by the wayside." Regretting that she did not make more effort, this critic continues: "What she left will be enough for memory with us, even if her fame was not matured for the world's wider circle."

Other Works:

Scenes from Real Life, and Other American Tales (1841). The Complete Poetical Works (1848).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

The American Female Poets (1848). Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887). ACritical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased (1863). The Female Poets of America (1851).

—PHYLLIS GOTTLIEB