Arthur Chapman

Arthur Chapman (June 25, 1873 – December 4, 1935) was an early twentieth-century American poet, newspaper columnist and author. He wrote a subgenre of American poetry known as cowboy poetry. His most famous poem was Out Where the West Begins.

Early life

Arthur Chapman was born in Rockford, Illinois on June 25, 1873. He worked at a newspaper there before moving to Chicago.

Out Where the West Begins

In 1910, Chapman wrote his most famous poem, "Out Where the West Begins". Chapman had read an Associated Press report of governors of the Western States debating where the American West actually began geographically. In response, he hastily composed a poem that celebrated the people and the land of the region.

The first of its three seven-line stanzas ran,

The poem was an immediate sensation, widely quoted, often imitated, and often parodied.

According to the dust jacket of Chapman's 1921 novel, Mystery Ranch, "To-day ["Out Where the West Begins"] is perhaps the best-known bit of verse in America. It hangs framed in the office of the Secretary of the Interior at Washington. It has been quoted in Congress, and printed as campaign material for at least two Governors.... [Chapman's poems possess] a rich Western humor such as had not been heard in American poetry since the passing of Bret Harte."

The popularity of "Out Where the West Begins" led Chapman to release it with his other poems in an anthology. In 1916, he published Out Where the West Begins, and Other Small Songs of a Big Country, a fifteen-page volume issued by Carson-Harper in [Denver]. The book was an immediate commercial success; Houghton Mifflin of Boston and New York immediately offered to publish a larger collection. Out Where the West Begins, and Other Western Verses, as it was renamed, appeared in 1917 with fifty-eight poems. The title poem was widely reprinted on postcards and plaques. In 1920, "Out Where the West Begins" was first set to music. The poem later achieved a separate life on the concert stage.