Guest was a newspaper reporter for a number of years before he began writing poetry, so one tends to suspect that he wrote what he wrote because it sold newspapers.

Titus, on the other hand, believed that he was a truely great poet. He was a religious reformer who was affiliated with Father Divine in his later years, and a rather dramatic spokesman for the Temperance Movement--

In 1937, Time Magazine reported that he appeared in a saloon in Lakehurst, N.J. with a kerosene-soaked rag stuffed in his shoe to repel mosquitoes, whereupon he fell to one knee and recited his famous poem--he was 91 at the time.