Type: Exhibition caption
Detail: Alfred Joyce Kilmer was a literary critic, editor, and poet who served as a sergeant in World War I. He is best known for his poem “Trees” which was first published in the August 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey to Frederick Barnett Kilmer, inventor of Johnson and Johnson’s baby powder, and Annie Kilburn-Kilmer, writer and musical composer, Kilmer attended Rutgers College from 1904 to 1906. At Rutgers, he was the associate editor of the Targum and a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He transferred to Columbia University in the fall of 1906 because he was unable to complete the university’s rigorous mathematics requirement and did not want to repeat his sophomore year.
Kilmer enlisted in the New York National Guard in 1917. After his death in the Second Battle of Marne in July 1918, many of his poems were set to music. “Trees” was composed by Oscar Rasbach and often sung by fellow alumni Paul Robeson in the 1930s. Kilmer’s mother composed “Lullaby for a Baby Fairy,” “Gifts of Shee,” and her own version of “Trees.”