Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley

It is said that Indiana’s best-known poet did not portray but invented the typical Hoosier. Applying imaginative skill, Riley altered and adapted the people around him to suit his purpose. As Jeannette Covert Nolan once put it, the figure who emerged was “a mellow, humorous rustic, a quaint, bucolic philosopher, unlettered but gifted with an earthy shrewdness, a peasant wisdom, a heart of gold, speaking a drawling, hybrid tongue, a dubious dialect as yet unidentified by any philologist.”
In his heyday Riley was famous all over the world. Though often called a children’s poet, he actually wrote about children for adults, delighting in emotional reminders of an irretrievable past–perhaps one that never quite existed. Throughout his life Riley looked back wistfully and sentimentally upon his childhood days, turning the longings and unfulfilled dreams of youth into verse. So celebrated was he in Indiana that in many public elementary schools, students were required to memorize and recite one of his poems every week for admiring audiences of visiting parents.