The short but celebrated life of Joyce Kilmer is on display in a summer-long exhibit that includes rarely-seen photos of the poet and World War I patriot in the Morristown & Morris Township Library.
The display, which fills the entire F.M. Kirby Gallery on the second floor of the library, opened on July 5 and will run until September 18.
“We are honored that this prestigious gallery is hosting the display of Joyce Kilmer photos and facts for the enjoyment of an ever-expanding number of people,” said Alex Michelini, founder of the Joyce Kilmer Society of Mahwah, which is presenting the display.
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The gallery is named after the co-founder of the F. W. Woolworth stores.
A highlight is a section on the little-known history of Kilmer in Morristown immediately after graduating from Columbia University in 1908. He married Aline Murray of Metuchen and started his career as a teacher in Morristown High School.
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Kilmer spent only one year teaching, although he received three offers of principalships and several others as a teacher, choosing instead to enter the literary world in New York City.
The display follows his career through a number of literary jobs, culminating with a position as a journalist at The New York Times.
He was living in Mahwah when he obtained the Times job, and it was in Mahwah that the Society proved beyond doubt that he wrote the famous poem “Trees” in his house on February 2nd, 1913, Michelini said.
The exhibit includes photographic evidence found by the Society at the Georgetown University library last year that shows the notebook in which Kilmer wrote and dated “Trees.”
In addition, a photo of Aline Kilmer’s 1929 letter found in the library stating that “Trees” was written in their Mahwah house in a room with a desk at a window “looking down a wooded hill” also is on display.
Kilmer wrote many other poems in and about Mahwah, including "The House With Nobody In It," "Mount Houvenkopf," "Memorial Day," "The Twelve-Forty-Five," and "Delicatessen."
There are nearly a score of vintage books written by or about Kilmer in the exhibit.
The story of Kilmer’s supreme sacrifice in World War I is also detailed in words and pictures. He was killed in action in France leading an intelligence mission to pinpoint an enemy machine gun nest. Kilmer was killed by a sniper, and was posthumously awarded the French Croix de Guerre for courage under fire.
Kilmer wrote two classic wartime poems, "The White Ships and the Red," (about the sinking of the liner Lusitania), and "Rouge Bouquet," (about an enemy shell that entombed 15 soldiers from his "Fighting 69th" regiment in France).
General Douglas MacArthur, a member of the Rainbow Division with Kilmer, kneeled at his gravesite in an American cemetery in France in 1931, and a 3,840-acre forest named the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest was set aside by Congress in his honor in 1936 in North Carolina.
Kilmer was the most distinguished American to die in the war.
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