Arthur Wheelock Upson papers

Arthur Wheelock Upson, noted poet and lecturer of English at the University of Minnesota.

Arthur W. Upson was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1877. In 1894, Upson and his family moved to Minnesota from New York. He entered the University with the class of 1898, however he struggled with poor health most of his adult life and was unable to complete the requirements for a degree. During his collegiate years he had published a little book of verse called At the Sign of the Harp. In 1906 the University awarded him a degree after the publication of one of his volumes of distinguished poetry. The Bellman, a small but influential literary magazine of the early 1900s, was one of the first periodicals to publish his work. As a student, Upson wrote the second verse to “Hail! Minnesota,” a song composed by Truman Rickard that would become the University hymn and later the official state song. In 1906 he became a lecturer in the English department. Two years later, Upson drowned while boating alone on Lake Bemidji in northern Minnesota, where he had gone to finish a verse play while on vacation.

After Upson's death, his poems were collected and published in two volumes by Edmund D. Brooks and William C. Edgar, friends and admirers of the poet. When Walter Library opened in 1924, his friend Ruth Shepard Phelps led the effort to establish and furnish a reading room in his memory. The Arthur Upson Room formally opened on 21 February 1925.