Markham's "The Man with a Hoe" was undoubtedly, with Longfellow's "Hiawatha," Lowell's "Old Ironsides," Whittier's "Snowbound," and Emerson's "Concord Hymn," among the most popular of nineteenth-century poems. In the days and weeks after it first appeared on January 15, 1899, in the San Francisco Examiner, Markham's poem was republished in over 10,000 newspapers and magazines, and translated into more than forty languages. But unlike those earlier popular successes, Markham's poem was, in its time, a controversial work: it was both proclaimed and denounced as advocating socialism. There were those who saw it as articulating the grievances of farmers and workers against the excessive power of banks, railroads, and capitalists. Others took it to express a "radical" solution to the troubles of an America that had just moved from being a majority rural to a majority urban nation, a country within which disparities of wealth were rapidly widening, a populace wherein the presumably inarticulate voice of the worker and the immigrant were little heard. But there were also those who perceived it as a dangerous call to unneeded and unwanted reforms. Markham himself saw it as "a poem of hope." Written after seeing Jean-François Millet's famous painting, the poem for Markham was an effort to capture what the painter had seized upon. Millet, Markham wrote, "had swept his canvas bare of everything that was merely pretty, and projected this startling figure before us in all its rugged and savage reality. . . . I saw in it the symbol of betrayed humanity."

Read today, it is hard to understand just why the poem hit such sensitive nerves. In its elaborate language, learned metaphors, and narrowly reformist ideology, it seems, as it is, the expression of middle-class fear as well as middle-class desire for top-down solutions to prevailing social problems. However that might have been, the poem and its promotion by the Hearst newspapers in which it was first published established Markham's career. From that point until almost the end of his life, he became a fixture of poetry societies and reading circuits, as well as of the periodicals that spoke to, or at least helped create, mass culture. Few personalities of the time were as widely known as Markham, and few profited so systematically as he from celebrity.

He had been born in the Oregon Territory to an extremely demanding mother, who moved to California with her youngest children when Edwin was four. There he was educated, learned to work a ranch, attended California College in Vacaville and San Jose Normal School, and taught and administered a number of schools. He also entered into a series of disastrous marriages and liaisons and in the 1880s began to earn money by writing poetry, published at first in local newspapers, then in nationally circulated magazines including The Century and Scribner's. He also for a period came under the influence of the leader, Thomas Lake Harris, of a utopian colony of the sort rather too often charged against California. The efforts of the Brotherhood of the New Life to reconcile vague ideals of equality, religious aspirations, and social reform would brand Markham's poetry--widely popular in its time but increasingly marginal in the formally experimental and intellectually ambiguous world of the inter-war period. A philosophy that claimed "two things--reverence for women and consecration to Social Solidarity" as the hope for political progress could not withstand the onslaught of modernism. Thus, while he may have been the most well known poet of his period among ordinary people, his reputation among critics and other writers declined to almost vanishing. "The Man with a Hoe" and, perhaps, his "Lincoln, the Man of the People" are of all his verse alone read today.