Omens and Oracles, composed about 1900, is another of Ives’s ‘Sentimental Ballads’: its emotional extremities well fulfil that description. Ives noted that the author of the text was not known to him, although it has been identified as an adaptation of a poem by Owen Meredith, a pseudonym of Robert Bulwer-Lytton, first Earl of Lytton (son of the better-known novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton).
from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2008
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