My Shadow (poem)

On publication, the poem did not find favour with a reviewer in British Quarterly Review, who preferred The Hayloft, Farewell to the Farm, and The North-West Passage.^[5] By the twentieth century, however, it had become sufficiently popular to be included in the syllabus of several elementary school in the United States, including 1918,^[6] 1916,^[7] and 1921.^[8] In 1948, the U.S. President Harry S. Truman used the lines, "I have a little shadow / That goes in and out with me; / And what can be the use of him / Is more than I can see" to refer to a Republican candidate "running along behind him."^[9][10]

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