1816–1887 · American lawyer-poet, newspaper editor and lecturer
John Godfrey Saxe was a Vermont attorney who became one of nineteenth-century America’s most popular comic poets — admitted to the bar in 1843, State’s Attorney for Chittenden County, and editor of the Burlington Sentinel from 1850 to 1856. He is best remembered today for The Blind Men and the Elephant, but in his own lifetime he was a celebrity of the lecture circuit, and newspapers routinely printed his one-liners as the sayings of “that illustrious rhymer.” That is exactly how the sausage aphorism reaches us: not from a book of his, but from the press quoting him in the spring of 1869.