Dreams in Homespun

This anthology of poems by Sam Walter Foss encapsulates his love of nature and of the slow pace of rural living.

As a working poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Foss would author a poem a day for various newspapers; many were designed to appeal to the ordinary man, and recalled the simple pleasures of life and the beauty of the natural world, with vignettes of rural events and daily happenings. Sometimes patriotic, Foss also celebrated the spirit and character of the United States, with allusions to the nation’s religious heritage, growing wealth and political prowess.

In the main however, Sam Walter Foss’s work read as evocative recollections of a world gone by, of a time when most of America’s citizens were well-acquainted with the land and its bounty, and thanked the heavens for favorable harvests. A relative absence of mass manufacture led many to purchase goods locally or craft their own; ‘homespun’ being clothing weaved in the residence. Taken as an echo of this long ago, Dreams in Homespun is superb reading.