So let us now praise Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1896-1988), a fifth-generation Westerner who made a literary place - and a literary life - of his own at 2123 Downing Street, his Denver home for decades (which is now owned by the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, and home to the Lighthouse Writers Workshop).

Just as poet Wallace Stevens stayed committed for a professional lifetime to an anti-poetic day job as an insurance executive, Ferril spent 42 years at the Great Western Sugar Company downtown as their publicity director and advertising manager, all the while going home to his house on Downing Street every evening to produce poetry that won myriad awards, from first place in the Yale Younger Poets competition to major prizes from magazines like Nation and Poetry.

The Victorian house he shared with his wife Helen was host to guests who were friends first and famous second: Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Dorothy Parker and many others. If a writer came to Denver, then they came to Ferril's home for at least one evening of conversation and conviviality.

Frost wrote admiringly of Ferril, immortalizing him with these lines:

Not stopping at poetry, Ferril wrote an award-winning play as well as a weekly column under a pen-name in the small weekly newspaper he and his wife owned, The Rocky Mountain Herald. A commentator in Harper's at the time declared Ferril's column, "...the best weekly column in contemporary journalism...there is no second place; the runner-up comes in third."

Like Eugene Field, Ferril's poetry is - for the moment - mostly overlooked and out-of-print for the crime of rhyming from time to time. The omission is superficial, though, because his poetry is decidedly in print in other more conspicuous and enduring ways: Stand in the rotunda of the State Capitol Building and you're surrounded by his lines ("Here is a land where life is written in water."); stand in the urban park at the historic confluence of the Platte River and Cherry Creek and you'll see his words written in bronze.

Ferril loved Colorado and never failed to celebrate it, so over time Colorado reciprocated: in 1979 he was named as the state's Poet Laureate. In 1996 - the centennial of his birth - the City of Denver named the lake in City Park - a lake Ferril and his beloved spaniel circled many times - Ferril Lake.