Henry Clay Brockmeyer

Henry Clay Brockmeyer (born Heinrich Conrad Brokmeyer, August 12, 1826 near Petershagen, Prussia – July 26, 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri) was a German-American poet, philosopher, and politician.

On his mother's side he was a nephew of Friedrich Wilhelm von Bismarck, a Napoleonic-era general and diplomat in Württemberg.

[1] He emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, reputedly after his religious mother burned his copy of Goethe's poems.

He did manage to make the acquaintance of several literary notables, including Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman.

He returned to St. Louis to work in several iron foundries there, and met William Torrey Harris, then beginning a promising career in education.

[4] At the beginning of the Civil War Brockmeyer, a strong Union man, enlisted in the militia and helped organize a regiment, but, in the confusion of the time, was accused of disloyalty, arrested and imprisoned briefly.

[7] Denton Jacques Snider called Brockmeyer "a genuine original elemental poet" and said that "Without this poetic power he could not have barbed his weighty philosophy with flashes of lightning which would pierce and illumine for a moment at least the dullest and darkest brainpan.