Henry Timrod

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Timrod, Henry (1828–67), born in Charleston, was educated at Franklin College (the present University of Georgia), and was a member of the Russell's Bookstore Group. During his brief life he published only one volume of Poems (1860), delicate treatments of nature showing his training in the classics. During the Civil War, the tuberculosis from which he later died made him unfit for military service, and he unsuccessfully attempted to eke out a living by editing a Columbia newspaper and writing poetry. These sad last years he summed up when he wrote to his friend Hayne, “You ask me to tell you my story for the last year…. I can embody it all in a few words: beggary, starvation, death, bitter grief, utter want of hope!” Nevertheless, his trials stirred him to write his greatest poetry, which, no longer showing the dependence of his earlier work, included such poems as “Ethnogenesis,” “The Cotton Boll,” and “Ode” on the graves of the Confederate dead, whose passionate emotion is the more effective because of the cool, severe utterance. After his death, his friend Hayne collected his Poems (1873), with a sympathetic introduction. Later publications include Katie (1884), a long love lyric addressed to his wife, and Complete Poems (1899). He is called “the laureate of the Confederacy.”

Henry Timrod 1828–67, American poet, b. Charleston, S.C., studied at the Univ. of Georgia. He was known as "the laureate of the Confederacy." Timrod became editor of the Columbia South Carolinian in 1864, but, ruined by the war, he died in poverty of tuberculosis, having published only one volume of poems (1860). His works were posthumously edited (1873) by his friend P. H. Hayne. Timrod's finest poems are his "Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery,""The Cotton Boll,""Carolina," and "Ethnogenesis."

Bibliography: See the memorial edition of his Poems (1899) and critical editions of his Last Years, ed. by J. B. Hubbell (1941), Uncollected Poems, ed. by G. A. Cardwell, Jr. (1942), and Essays, ed. by E. W. Parker (1942). See also studies by H. T. Thompson (1928, repr. 1971) and E. W. Parks (1964).