Henry Timrod

Henry Timrod

Henry Timrod (born December 8, 1828 in Charleston , South Carolina , died October 7, 1867 in Columbia , South Carolina) was an American poet and journalist. He is best known for his poems written during the American Civil War , in which he glorified the breakaway southern states .

Life

Childhood and youth

Henry Timrod was born the third of four children of German bookbinder William Henry Timrod , a veteran of the Seminole Wars , and his wife Thyrza Prince. His father William was an occasional poet and published a volume of poetry in 1814. His workshop was a favorite meeting place for writers in Charleston in the 1820s and 1830s. This city, where Timrod grew up and where he was to spend most of his life, was one of the cultural centers of the southern states, especially in the 19th century, and one of the few in which a noteworthy literary culture developed at all. William Henry Timrod died in 1838, but his high reputation in Charleston opened many doors for his son Henry in later years that would otherwise have remained closed to him given the limited financial resources of his family.

From 1840 onwards, Henry attended the Classical School of the English immigrant Christopher Cotes, which at that time was the preferred private school for the offspring of the upper class in Charleston. Here Timrod received a comprehensive classical education and became familiar with Latin and Greek poetry. Timrod's friendship with Paul Hamilton Hayne , who was to support him in his poetic ambitions during his lifetime, and who after Timrod's death contributed significantly to the fact that his work became known to a wider public , also began during his school days . Another schoolmate was Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve , who would later become the most important American classical scholar of his time.

In 1845 Timrod began studying at the University of Georgia in Athens , but dropped out after barely a year for unknown reasons and returned to Charleston in 1847. There he began his legal training in the law firm of the renowned lawyer James L. Petigru ; Since the state of South Carolina did not have a law school at the time, prospective lawyers studied with a licensed attorney.

The 1850s: Living as a Country School Teacher

Timrod taught at this school in Florence, South Carolina in the 1850s

Timrod also finally broke off his training as a lawyer in 1849, because he had come to the conclusion that the legal profession was a “tasteless occupation”. Although he had no university degree, he toyed with the idea of ​​pursuing an academic career, preferably as a classical philologist, and was apparently working on a new translation of Catullus poems .

Instead, poor means forced him to pursue a more humble teaching career. In the 1850s he hired himself as a teacher at various country schools, but also as a private tutor for the children of plantation owners in North and South Carolina, but returned to Charleston whenever he could. Here he became a leading member of the literary and academic circle that rallied around the bookstore John Russells and to which, in addition to Timrod and Hayne, William Gilmore Simms was one . Timrod became one of the most prolific contributors to the literary magazine Russell's Magazine , which the coven started in 1857. In addition, he published mainly in The Southern Literary Messenger . In 1859 his first and only volume of poetry went to print at the Boston publishing house Ticknor and Fields . In the 1850s, which were marked by the escalation of the conflict between northern and southern states, Timrod initially showed little interest in current political events and was more interested in poetry, nature and beautiful women than in the slavery and secession debate.

Civil war and death

That changed when the conflict escalated towards the end of 1860. Timrod's home state, South Carolina, announced its exit from the Union, a move that by far most southern states joined in 1861. On the occasion of the founding of the Confederate States of America on February 4, 1861 in Montgomery, Timrod, impressed by the patriotic exuberance of these days, wrote an ode to the bright future of the new nation. This poem was reprinted under the title Ethnogenesis (" Ethnogenesis ") in many southern state newspapers, distributed in many places as a leaflet and thus proved to be effective propaganda . With further poems, in particular The Cotton Boll (" The Cotton Boll ", September 1861) and Carolina (March 1862), in which he justified the secession of the southern states and underlined their moral superiority, Timrod established himself as the eulogist of the cause of the South and became nationwide known. These and the following poems brought Timrod fame, but hardly any money, especially since the economy of the southern states steered towards collapse with the duration of the war.

On April 12, the American Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in front of the harbor entrance of Timrod's hometown Charleston . During the general mobilization to Timrod first the closed in April 1861 militia from Hardeeville to where it had drifted a job as a teacher; in December of that year he joined the Confederate Army as a private with the 20th South Carolina Infantry Regiment . However, since Timrod's health was weakened - he was diagnosed with tuberculosis as early as 1858 - he was initially given a staff position by the regimental commander, Timrod's friend Laurence M. Keitt , but was eventually released.

In the spring of 1862, Timrod took a job as a war correspondent for the Charleston newspaper Mercury and set out on the battlefields of the west. In April of that year he reached Corinth, Mississippi , where General Beauregard's troops had withdrawn after the defeat in the Battle of Shiloh . Under the code name Kappa he reported in his dispatches to Charleston about the catastrophic conditions in the camp, but his tender disposition was not made for the duties of a war correspondent. With the withdrawal of Beauregard's troops in the Battle of Corinth , Timrod also fled the advance of the Union troops and returned to Charleston via Mobile, Alabama .

That destroyed Charleston, 1865

The final years of the war brought Timrod personal happiness and professional success, but the war and its consequences ultimately hit him too. In January 1864, Timrod became editor of the newly founded newspaper The South Carolinian in Columbia, but the salary failed to come and when the troops Shermans occupied the city in February 1865, Timrod had to flee; the editorial rooms were destroyed. In February 1864, Timrod married his former student and long-time fiancé Katie Godwin. His son Willie was born on Christmas Day, but in October 1865, a few months after the surrender of the southern states, the baby died; Timrod recorded his grief in the poem Our Willie . Tuberculosis was increasingly affecting him himself. In 1867 he died impoverished in Columbia.

plant

Love and nature poems

In his gallant love poems, Timrod often used the stereotype of the Southern Belle , as found in this contemporary depiction.

Timrod's beginnings as a poet come from school and university. From this early work around 80 poems have survived in manuscript, mostly quite wooden imitations of dignified, polite love poetry, as it had been widespread in English poetry since the time of the cavalier poets , but whose motifs and conventions were soon frozen into clichés. Especially in the American southern states, which liked their self-image as a class society based on the European model and accordingly considered a certain aristocratic sophistication to be desirable, especially in matters of love, this type of poetry was a socially sanctioned pastime for the budding southern gentleman. Some of the poems are neoclassical odes to love (or to Cupid , the god of love), but most of them are addressed to young women and praise their beauty, purity and sophistication. From the names that run through the dedications and poems - Marie, Rose, Isabel, Anne, Genevieve, etc. - it can be seen that Timrod's love affairs were as numerous as fleeting.

Many of these poems were apparently intended for the poetry albums of young women in Athens and Charleston, and only a few of these finger exercises did Timrod later seek publication. Timrod's first published poem, a sonnet, signed T.H. (i.e. his reversed initials), appeared on September 8, 1846 in the Charleston daily Evening News . From 1849 Timrod's poems appeared regularly under the pseudonym Aglaus in the Southern Literary Messenger ; It was not until 1856 that Timrod identified himself as the author behind the pseudonym and from then on published under his real name.

Under the influence of the reading of British poets, in particular William Wordsworth , Robert Browning and Tennyson, Timrod increasingly turned to a romantic worldview and a corresponding concept of poetry. Many of his poems from the 1850s are about the loneliness of the poet's genius, who goes into nature to draw inspiration there. The optimistic Wordsworthian idea of ​​poetic subjectivity, which is valued as a mediator between spirit and nature to the privileged mode of knowledge, is, however, accompanied by a noticeable doubt in some of Timrod's poems. In The Summer Bower and The Stream Is Flowing from the West in particular, the poet is unable to win a moment of grandeur from the genius loci ; The grove and the river do not appear here as a place of consolation and knowledge of the world, but rather as mute, mindless and senseless objects that are indifferent to the poet and at best can show him the limits of his capacity for knowledge:

The Summer Bower

No adequate excuse, nor cause, nor end,
I, with these thoughts, and on this summer day,
Entered the accustomed haunt, and found for once
No medicinal virtue.
Not a leaf
Stirred with the whispering welcome which I sought,
But in a close and humid atmosphere,
Every fair plant and implicated bough
Hung lax and lifeless. Something in the place,
Its utter stillness, the unusual heat,
And some more secret influence, I thought,
Weighed on the sense like sin.

The Stream Is Flowing from the West

The stream is flowing from the west;
As if it poured from yonder skies,
It wears upon its rippling breast

The sunset's golden dyes;
[...]
Alas! I leave no trace behind -
As little on the senseless stream
As on thy heart, or on thy mind

Timrod's doubts about his own poetic calling are also expressed in his longest poem, A Vision of Poesy (1858/59). The poet, burdened by years of strife with the muse, is only heard here on his deathbed by Poesy , the personified poetry. Timrod, however, most clearly formulated his poetology in a theoretical essay that appeared in Russell's Magazine in 1857 as a response to a polemic by William J. Grayson against the English Romantics. While Grayson, an advocate of neoclassical ideals of style and common-sense philosophy, following the famous definition in Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, simply called a poet anyone who likes to write his writings in verse, Timrod affirmed his belief in a poetic one "Essence". A poet, according to Timrod, must have an extraordinary sensitivity to feel, like Wordsworth, in moments of “ecstatic contemplation” in his soul “the presence of the enigmatic and the universal”. Only the poet as a “medium of strong feelings” can depict these mystical moments in pictorial, concrete, sensual and concise language and thus let the reader participate in these moments of the sublime. Ultimately, Timrod's poetic literature proves to be ethically motivated in this essay: Timrod rejects Poe's pure aestheticism, since beauty is one, but not the only source of poetry; Force and truth are also indispensable. Timrod therefore describes Tennyson's poetry as exemplary , who is not afraid to make his art a "vehicle for great moral and philosophical teachings."

War poems

The character and function of Timrod's poetry changed fundamentally with the secession of his home state South Carolina, the establishment of the Southern Confederation, and the outbreak of the Civil War. The romantic inwardness gave way to a political sense of mission. The question of secession has been an extremely emotionally charged topic for decades. Timrod's father let himself be carried away in 1828 in view of the first nullification crisis to write an ode, in which he appealed to the unity of his fellow citizens. With the renewed escalation of the question in 1860/1861, a multitude of occasional poems appeared that conjured up the cause of the Union (such as Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic ) or secession (such as James Ryder Randalls Maryland, my Maryland ).

In this climate of patriotic exuberance, Timrod wrote an ode on the occasion of the founding of the Confederate States of America in 1861 , which soon found widespread use under the title Ethnogenesis . In it, he describes the “birth” of a separate nation in the American southern states, which will now take its due place among the other nations of the world, in an apocalyptic-looking imagery reminiscent of Milton . Timrod increases the conflict to an ethical-religious conflict: The North ruled from an "evil throne", had broken with God and preached an unrestrained and unchristian materialism:

“ On one side, creeds that dare to teach
What Christ and Paul refrained to preach;
Codes built upon a broken pledge,
[…]
Religion, taking every mortal form
But that a pure and Christian faith makes warm,
[…]
Repulsive with all Pharisaic leaven,
And making laws to stay the laws of Heaven! "

The Company of the South have, however, maintained the organic unity with creation, whether with themselves and their plaice at peace:

But every stock and stone

Shall help us; but the very soil,

And all the generous wealth it gives to toil,

And all for which we love our noble land,

Shall fight beside, and through us; sea ​​and beach,

Should the north dare to attack this "happy land", the south would undoubtedly decide the conflict for itself with God's help and could henceforth fill the whole world with its spirit, just as the Gulf Stream fills arctic lands with its warmth. In Ethnogenesis , Timrod also used cotton , the main source of income in the south, as a symbol of the southern states for the first time . Just as the Russian snow defeated Napoleon's troops, so cotton, the “snow of the southern winter”, will save the south from harm.

The cotton becomes the central symbol in The Cotton Boll (" The Cotton Boll "), Timrod's second " Pindarian Ode ", as he himself called it. In it he elevates the blossom-white cotton as a symbol for the immaculate culture of the southern states. The slavery on which cotton cultivation in the south was based is never explicitly addressed in the entire work of Timrod; the only reference to the slaves of the cotton fields is tellingly a synecdochical reduction to the "dark fingers" that pluck the cotton bolls:

Small sphere!

( By dusky fingers brought this morning here

And shown with boastful smiles )

It is piquant in this context that a research into the genealogy of his family in the 1930s came to the conclusion that Timrod himself was probably at least a sixteenth of African descent; a court document from the 18th century denied his great-grandmother as black the right to testify in court, and her daughter Sarah Faesch, Timrod's maternal grandmother, is listed as free black in the 1790 census.

With the increasing duration and severity of the war, a more contemplative tone was added to the cheer patriotism in Timrod's poems; in Charleston (1863) , for example, the emaciated city's longing for peace is the central motif; in Christmas (1863), a poem also admired by Longfellow and Alfred Tennyson , the mass deaths on the battlefields overshadow the blessed Christmas season. One of Timrod's last poems, the “Ode sung on the occasion of the decoration of the graves of the confederate's dead in the Magnolia cemetery” (1867), declares the fallen to be “ martyrs ”, but the mourning for the fallen outweighs the ideological transfiguration.

Edition history

During Timrod's lifetime, his poems appeared mostly in various newspapers and magazines, the distribution of which was mostly limited to the place of publication. In 1859 his first and only volume of poetry, simply titled Poems , went to print at the Boston publishing house Ticknor and Fields . Although the title page of this edition bears the year 1860, the copyright does indicate the year 1859. It is certain that the volume was available by Christmas 1859 at the latest. Apparently the volume was only available by subscription and was therefore not sold in regular bookshops; so the number of copies sold remained small. Although the few reviews were positive, Timrod ultimately went unnoticed by the wider public. After 1861, when Timrod became famous for his highly publicized war poetry, the desolate economic situation, which hit the publishing and book trade in the southern states, made it impossible to publish any further books. Plans for an English edition of Timrod's poems - Timrod had completed the fair copies towards the end of 1863 , and Frank Vizetelli , who was a war correspondent in the southern states, was the illustrator - destroyed the reality of the war.

Cover of the first edition of The Poems of Henry Timrod . Hale & Son, New York 1872.

After Timrod's death there was a real quarrel between two friends of Timrod about the honor of being able to publish his collected works. While William A. Courtenay relied on a personal promise he had made to Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne , who had played a role in Timrod's career that could hardly be overestimated during his lifetime, relied on the support of the Timrod's family, especially his widow Katie and his sister Emily Timrod Goodwin. After all, it was Hayne who, towards the end of 1872, acted as editor of the collected works under the title The Poems of Henry Timrod and introduced them with a very personal biographical essay. This edition proved to be extremely successful. The reviews were consistently positive in the northern states as well, and the first edition sold within a few months, so that the publisher, the New York-based company E. J. Hale & Son, published a second edition, expanded by a few poems, in 1873.

It was not until years after Hayne's death that Courtenay put his plans for an edition of Timrod's poems into practice. In 1899 he founded the Timrod Memorial Association , the aim of which was to make Timrod accessible again with a new edition of his poems and to use the proceeds and private donations to erect a memorial in honor of Timrod. The Poems of Henry Timrod were of dubious editorial quality - all the poems of the Hayne edition were taken over unchanged, a few poems from the Poems of 1859 were added, and they were rearranged in an apparently quite random manner - but Courtenay achieved both of his goals. The band sold exceptionally well, and in 1901 a larger than life bust of Timrod was unveiled in a solemn ceremony in Charleston's Washington Park.

In 1942, Timrod's poems (Uncollected Poems) , which until then were only known in manuscripts, and, edited by Edd Winfield Parks , Timrod's essays and journalistic works, were published in book form.

Aftermath

The Timrod Memorial in Charleston

The establishment of Courtenays Timrod Memorial Association sparked a "Timrod Revival" , an interest in Timrod's life and work that has continued to this day. Timrod was glorified - at least as much because of his poems as because of the symbolism of his personal tragedy - the poet of the Lost Cause and was widely venerated in the southern states. In 1911 the General Assembly of South Carolina decided, on a proposal by the Daughters of the American Revolution , to make Timrod's Carolina the official state song . Allen Tate , one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Southern literature of the 1920s and 1930s, paid tribute to Timrod by performing his famous Ode to the Confederate Dead , 1928 to Timrod's Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina in 1866 .

Recently, Bob Dylan leaned on Timrod's verses for some of the lyrics of his album Modern Times , which was released in autumn 2006 , but without explicitly referring to it. A controversy arose, especially on the pages of the New York Times , as to whether Dylan was guilty of plagiarism or whether he was just "inspired". Here is one of the incriminated passages compared to Timrod's verses:

" A round of precious hours Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers. " - Timrod : Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night

" More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours " - Dylan : When the Deal Goes Down

It was also pointed out that the title of the Dylan album contains all the letters of Timrod's last name and could thus represent an encrypted reference.

In the canon of American literature , however, Timrod only has a subordinate position. Timrod's poems seem all too conventional to literary historiography, which in American studies mostly presents itself as the history of aesthetic innovations towards the modern age; his adherence to the understanding of art of the English romantics like Wordsworth makes his poetry appear not only not very original, especially in international comparison, but also out of date. But even in comparison to Timrod's New York and New England contemporaries such as Herman Melville , Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson , whose breaches of convention are considered to be groundbreaking for 20th century poetry, Timrod's poetic work seems too much arrested in the place and time of its creation. At most, in the literary history of the American South, which is often treated separately, he is listed alongside Poe and Lanier as one of the more important poets of the 19th century, a circumstance which in turn is often less due to Timrod's literary qualities, but to the "right attitude" of his early war poems and their usability for the myth of the "good old days" before the war and the respectability of the Southern Confederation is due. Hardly any literary history can avoid calling him the “ Poet Laureate of the Confederation” after the title of a Timrod biography from 1928 . Even in the Timrod biography by Brian Walter Cisco, published in 2004, the southern bias is clearly noticeable.

Daniel Aaron , author of a standard work on literature during the American Civil War, pronounced an impartial and benevolent judgment in 1973: Timrod was the “only authentic talent” among southern poets: “One turns away from pathetic, coarse and vague verses with relief the overpatriots now and then Timrod's thoughtful and dark poems. "

literature

Work editions

• Poems . Ticknor and Fields, Boston 1860.
• The Poems of Henry Timrod . Edited by Paul Hamilton Hayne. EJ Hale and Son, New York 1873.
• Poems of Henry Timrod; With Memoir and Portrait ("Memorial Edition"). Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston 1899.
• The Uncollected Poems of Henry Timrod . Edited by Guy A. Cardwell, Jr. The University of Georgia Press, Athens 1942.
• The Essays of Henry Timrod . Edited by Edd Winfield Parks. The University of Georgia Press, Athens 1942.

Secondary literature

• Daniel Aaron : The Unwritten War. American Writers and the Civil War . Knopf, New York 1973.
• Brian Walter Cisco: Henry Timrod: A Biography . Fairleigh Dickinson UP, Madison NJ 2004, ISBN 0-8386-4041-9 .
• Jack De Bellis: Sidney Lanier, Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne: A Reference Guide . GK Hall, Boston 1978.
• Jay B. Hubbell: The Last Days of Henry Timrod, 1864-1867 . Duke UP, Durham NC 1941.
• Edd Winfield Parks: Henry Timrod . Twayne, New York 1964.
• Carl Plasa: 'Tangled Skeins': Henry Timrod's 'The Cotton Boll' and the Slave Narratives . In: Southern Literary Journal 45: 1, 2012, pp. 1-20.
• James Reitter: The Legacy of Three Southern Civil War Poets: Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Sydney Lanier . In: South Carolina Review 41: 1, 2008, pp. 69-79.
• Louis Decimus Rubin, Jr .: The Edge of the Swamp: A Study of the Literature and Society of the Old South . Louisiana State UP, Baton Rouge 1989.

Web links

Wikisource: Henry Timrod - Poems  - Sources and full texts

• The Poems of Henry Timrod at Project Gutenberg

References and comments

1. ^ JA Leo Lemay: The Origins of the Humor of the Old South . In: M. Thomas Inge, Edward J. Piacentino (Eds.): The Humor of the Old South . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2001. pp. 15-16.
2. ↑ Cisco, p. 39.
3. ↑ Parks (p. 20) states that Timrod had previously attended the school of the German Friendly Society in Charleston from 1836 ; Cisco (p. 31), however, was unable to find any evidence for this.
4. ↑ Cisco, p. 38.
5. ↑ Cisco p. 40.
6. ^ Aaron, p. 236.
7. ↑ Cisco, p. 37.
8. ^ David S. Shields: Henry Timrod . In: Eric L. Haralson, John Hollander: Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, Chicago / London 1998. Accessed August 29, 2007.
9. ^ Parks, p. 57.
10. ↑ Parks, pp. 75-85.
11. ↑ Mario de Valdes y Cocom: The Blurred Racial Lines of Famous Families . PBS frontline
12. ↑ Parks, p. 100.
13. ↑ Cisco p. 55.
14. ↑ Cisco, pp. 86 and 91.
15. ↑ Parks, pp. 108–8 and bibliographical information on p. 146.
16. ^ The State Songs ( September 27, 2007 memento on the Internet Archive ) South Carolina Legislature Online.
17. ^ Suzanne Vega : The Ballad of Henry Timrod . In: New York Times , September 17, 2006; Accessed March 13, 2007.
18. ↑ Motoko Rich: Who's This Guy Dylan Who's Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod? In: New York Times , September 14, 2006; Accessed March 13, 2007.
19. ^ Winfried Fluck : The cultural imaginary. A functional history of the American novel 1790 to 1900 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 7 ff.
20. ^ Parks, p. 113.
21. ^ Parks, p. 115.
22. ↑ One turns with relief from the declamatory, truculent and diffuse verses of the superpatriots to Timrod's thoughtful and somber poems. Aaron, p. 235.

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on October 19, 2007 in this version .