Author: Wilcox, Carlos
Biography:
WILCOX, Carlos (1794-1827: ancestry.com)
The extensive memoir attached to the edition of his Remains in 1828, which includes many letters to his parents and siblings, is the source of most later accounts of him. He was the eldest child of Thankful (Stevens) and Ebenezer Wilcox, and was born in Newport NH. His paternal grandfather Abel Wilcox had been a deacon in North Killingworth CT. His parents, farmers and both well educated, moved a few years after his birth to Vermont, where he grew up. An accident with an axe left him unsuited for farming, but he was a precocious scholar who graduated at the top of his class from Middlebury College (1813) and then from Andover Theological seminary (1817). Though he was drawn to literature and made ambitious plans for a long poem on the theme of benevolence, he was persuaded to make the ministry his primary task. After some years of work on the poem, he published the first Book by itself as a fragment (1822). He preached to various congregations in New York and Connecticut and was eventually ordained as pastor of the North (Trinitarian) Congregational Church in Hartford CT in 1824. In the same year, he read his poem "The Religion of Taste" to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Obliged to resign his charge in 1826 on account of ill health--apparently heart disease--by 1826 he was sufficiently recovered to accept a call to Danbury CT, but his health continued to decline and he died there on 29 May 1827. His remains were later moved from Danbury to Hartford. The author of the Memoir, a fellow clergyman, describes him as "a gentle, amiable, and loving spirit." ("Memoir," Remains [1828]; ancestry.com 5 Feb. 2021; Appleton; Sprague) HJ