by Michael Ceraolo
The outlook turned out brilliant for a poem published on this day,
written under the pseudonym “Phin” in the City by the Bay
Declaimed famously by Hopper and many thousands more,
spawner of parodies and bad imitations by the score
It just may be the great poem Hoover later called for, at that:
Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s Casey at the Bat.
A 1912 first edition, courtesy of the New York Public Library.