Ralph Waldo Snow

Ralph Waldo Snow was the pen-name of Ralph Waldo Schneelock (1904-1929), the son of Walter Edward Schneelock (1875-1959), a hardware salesman of German descent, and his first wife Laura Josephine Russell (1879-1909).  The "schnee" element in the surname means "snow." Ralph was the third of five children.  He had two older brothers and two younger sisters, as well as some step-siblings after his father remarried following the death of his mother. As Snow he contributed poetry to newspapers and magazine, and in the 1920s made his home in Milford, Connecticut.

In 1927 Snow solicited contributions from Cline for his planned anthology of poets living in Connecticut.  In December 1927, Snow accepted two of the poems Cline had submitted, and noted that if space had permitted he would also have used the others. 

Snow's friend Elmer Davenport Keith (1888-1965; a Yale-Oxford man who had been associated with Harvard University Press) had purchased the Quinnipiack Press of New Haven, and his first publications were to be a volume by Snow and the anthology.

Passage to Paradise and Other Poems by Ralph Waldo Snow was published in May 1928, and Snow sent a copy to Cline, then serving his sentence in the Tolland Jail. Cline sent a slightly critical yet overall appreciative letter in response. 

The Connecticut Poetry Anthology, compiled and edited by Snow, was published in September 1928. It includes poems by fifty-one authors, including Snow and Cline, as well as Robert Hillyer, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Clinton Scollard, Genevieve Taggard, Mark Van Doren, and Amos Niven Wilder, brother of novelist Thornton Wilder. Cline's two poems were "Tenebrae," which had appeared in The Nation on 15 February 1928, and "Mass in the Valley," reprinted from The Midland, June-August 1924.  Both were reprinted in Cline's posthumous poetry collection, After-Walker (1930).

A brief obituary notes that Snow was a bank clerk and a poet, who had been living on a farm for several months in an effort to improve his health.  He died on 23 November 1929, and was buried in New Haven.