Mountain Idylls and Other Poems

Mountain Idylls and Other Poems is a collection by Alfred Castner King, who lived in Ouray, Colorado, near the end of the nineteenth century. He is billed as the Blind Poet of the San Juans, and the label has a cause. King was a hard rock miner who lost his sight before he put his poetry to paper, so the poems were composed and kept in his head.

The preface of the original 1901 book tells the story in his own terms. A premature mining explosion on March 17, 1900, left him totally and hopelessly blind. While he recovered in hospitals, he called back earlier ideas and poems from memory and shaped them into the collection. The preface is dated Ouray, March 15, 1901.

The poems turn toward the landscape he could no longer see. Poems in the opening pages include Grandeur, To the Pines, The Valley of the San Miguel and The Silvery San Juan. This edition of 184 pages is a Western Reflections reprint dated 2008 in our catalogue, of a book first issued by Fleming H. Revell Company in 1901.

This book is for readers of Colorado poetry and anyone curious about San Juan Mountains history seen through a single voice. It will interest people who study the mining era from the human side, since the poet was a miner before he was blinded. Teachers and librarians looking for primary material by a Colorado author with a disability will find a clear case here. It is verse written in the manner of its day, so expect formal rhymes and nature themes.

Alfred Castner King was a Colorado poet who lost his sight in a mining accident in 1900 and went on to publish, recite and lecture. A second collection followed in 1907, and he lived in Grand Junction in later years. Sources give differing birth years, so we leave that out. He died in 1941. Our author page for King carries the fuller account.

More about Alfred Castner King →

The accident that shaped this book happened on March 17, 1900, at a mining operation in Ouray. Accounts differ on his job there: the preface does not name one, and a biographical essay describes him as an assayer. The explosion cost him his sight and, for the rest of his life, left him with varying degrees of deafness.

King did not stop writing. His first collection, Mountain Idylls, appeared in 1901 with the Chicago and New York publisher Fleming H. Revell. A second, The Passing of the Storm and Other Poems, followed in 1907. A biographical essay reports that by 1925 the two books had reportedly sold 150,000 copies, and that he built a career lecturing across the United States, playing the flute and selling his books.

Newspapers called him the blind bard of Colorado. He settled for a time in Fruita with his wife and children, and later lived in Grand Junction, where he died in 1941. That is the person behind the poems in this reprint.

Source: Project Gutenberg edition of Mountain Idylls, and Other Poems