Claudius was the husband of Estelle Bush. He was the son of William Wallace Thayer, Oregon's sixth governor, and later Oregon's Supreme Court Justice. Claudius studied law and was admitted to the bar, although he never followed the profession. He was a man who devoted himself wholly to his books, his writings, his only daughter, and his wife. He began writing poetry while a young man and continued to do so all his life while he worked with the other literary forms. As he wrote he put his poems in notebooks, and from these he selected ones to be sent to various newspapers and magazines. When they appeared in print, he would clip them and past them in his notebooks. The Oregon State Archives have five such notebooks, records of a creative lifetime. After Claudius died, Estelle came home to Salem where she became active in the Literary Club and was revered as Mother Thayer by her many friends. It became her custom to open each meeting of the Club with a poem by Claudius. She collected his poems, selecting ninety-four of them for publication as POEMS by Claudius Thayer. . . Extracted from Marion County History, vol. 3, 1957 p. 41-44
This volume of poems is inscribed by the author's wife, Estelle Thayer to another author, Henry Noyes Pratt.
