I stumbled upon this site while looking for some info on the Schenectady putter and thought I'd post it here:
http://golfpoet.com/the-unknown-links-between-golf-and-poetry/There is some pretty good stuff, like "If Johnny Cash Had Been a Golfer", "The “Rubaiyat’s” Contribution to Golf Poetry", and even
"A Poem for Michelle Wie Upon her Graduation from Stanford".
But the one that I 'found' by accident was about Walter Travis and his Schenectady putter. The gentleman who runs the blog, Dr. Leon S White, said this about it:
" I am always on the lookout for old golf poetry books that I can afford. Recently I bid on a book published in England in 1905 called The Golf Craze ─ Sketches and Rhymes by “Cleeke Shotte, Esq.” It was offered by the PBA Galleries in San Francisco. And I won it. The book was actually written by John Hogben, a member of the Duddingston Golf Club in Edinburgh and its captain in 1921".
The site is worth visiting, please do, but I couldn't help snatching the WT poem and posting it here:
To W. J. Travis
Amateur Golf Champion, 1904
The cry is still “They come!” for we may say
The lust of conquest reigns in U.S.A.
Another Cup goes Westward; ‘tis a shock
We owe, sir, to that aluminium block
That taught your golf-ball all roads lead to Rome,
And sent it straight, and far, and surely home.
There is no name whereby to call the utter
Amazement that we owe to your strange putter.
It was not thought that in our chosen game
A foreign player could make good his claim
Against the prowess of the Britisher,
Without whom neither golf nor golfer were.
Forgive me, for you know the game is ours;
We sowed the seed; the world has reaped the flowers.
Yet, after all, no grudge we owe you, for
The mimic helps to stay the mighty war.
No Frenchman are you, German, or what not
But of our generous cousin-blood begot─
Nay, I forget, for closer still the ties,
Were you not cradled under Austral skies?