Clement Moore - The Reluctant Poet

The other night, we took a tour of some of NYC's finest Christmas light displays. While driving past the Chelsea Hotel, the driver told us the story of Clement Clark Moore.

... TRUTH BE TOLD, the 19th-century author who bequeathed us the image of a fat, jolly, white-bearded St. Nicholas ("His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!") was himself a dour, straitlaced academician. As a professor of classics at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, Clement C. Moore's most notable work prior to "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was a two-volume tome entitled A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language.

Fortunately for us, the man had children.

Legend has it Moore composed "A Visit from St. Nicholas" for his family on Christmas Eve of 1822, during a sleigh-ride home from Greenwich Village. He supposedly drew inspiration for the elfin, pot-bellied St. Nick in his poem from the roly-poly Dutchman who drove his sleigh that day. 

... Moore, stodgy creature of academe that he was, refused to have the poem published despite its enthusiastic reception by everyone who read it. His argument that it was beneath his dignity evidently fell on deaf ears, because the following Christmas "A Visit from St. Nicholas" found its way after all into the mass media when a family member submitted it to an out-of-town newspaper. The poem was an "overnight sensation," as we would say today, but Moore would not acknowledge authorship of it until fifteen years later, when he reluctantly included it in a volume of collected works. He referred to the poem "a mere trifle."

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/historical/a/clement_c_moore.htm

Of course today, Twas The Night Before Christmas  is all Clement Clarke Moore is remembered for.

As Paul Harvey used to say, "And now you know the rest of the story."