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FIELD, EUGENE (1850-1895), American poet, was born at St Louis, Missouri, on the 2nd of September 185o. He spent his boyhood in Vermont and Massachusetts; studied for short periods at Williams and Knox Colleges and the University of Missouri, but without taking a degree; and worked as a journalist on various papers, finally becoming connected with the Chicago News. A Little Book of Profitable Tales appeared in Chicago in 1889 and in New York the next year; but Field's place in later American literature chiefly depends upon his poems of Christmas-time and childhood (of which " Little Boy Blue
and " A Dutch Lullaby " are most widely known), because of their union of obvious sentiment with fluent lyrical form, His principal collections of poems are: A Little Book of Western Verse (1889); A Second Book of Verse (1892); With Trumpet and Drum (1892); and Love Songs of Childhood (1894). Field died at Chicago on the 4th of November 1895.
His works were collected in ten volumes (1896), at New York. His prose Love-affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) contains a Memoir by his brother Roswell Martin Field (b. 1851). See also Slason Thompson, Eugene Field: a study in heredity and contradictions (2 vols., New York, 1901).