Laurence Edward Innes — Collected Poems

Born February 11, 1879, Springfield, Missouri; death date unverified; active in Los Angeles, California, 1921

Laurence Edward Innes left a compact but lively poetic record of Southern California at the start of the 1920s. His two surviving Los Angeles booklets move between live oaks, dahlias, orange groves, ocean sunsets, desert trails, the Grand Canyon, Christmas weather, and comic encounters with the movie business. The poems are unabashedly local, yet their strongest moments come when promotional California confidence gives way to solitude or awe. This edition brings together the complete recoverable texts of Lines to an Ancient Live Oak and Other Verses of California and California and Western Verses, with their line breaks and visible indentations checked against the scans rather than inherited OCR.

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Catalogue

Poetry Clubs & Civic Culture

Associations

Nature, Science, and Environment

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Innes, Laurence Edward. California and Western Verses. L. E. Innes Books, 1921.

———. Lines to an Ancient Live Oak and Other Verses of California. J. C. Ernst, 1921.

———. The Palm Tree and the Poppy. J. C. Ernst, 1921.

Works About the Author

Krutch, Edwin D., editor. The World Encounters the Grand Canyon: A Worldwide Bibliography of the Grand Canyon and Lower Colorado River. 2022. Includes a bibliographic entry and the full text of Innes’s “A Moment at the Grand Canyon.”

———, editor. Too Numerous to Name: An Annotated Biographical Bibliography of Grand Canyon Writers. 2024.