Guest Author - Linda Sue Grimes

Henry Timrod lived a short life, dying at age thirty-nine after suffering for nearly a decade from tuberculosis. In fact, just about everything he did was short-lived: he served only a few months in the Confederate Army; he had to leave the service because of his poor health. He married in 1864 and died in 1867.

Henry Timrod was born December 8, 1828, in Charleston, SC. His father William Henry Timrod had served as a captain in the Seminole War and was also a published poet. His mother’s last name was Prince, but I have not been able to find out what her first name was.

When Timrod was born, Charleston, SC, was considered a southern literary capital with other poets such as William Gilmore Simms and Paul Hamilton Hayne, who were widely read but later considered “somewhat pallid and sentimental.”

Timrod had a scholarly nature and wanted to become a professor. He attended a good private school and then entered the University of Georgia, but had to drop out after a year because of his poor health. He continued to study the classics and other literature in hopes of returning to his studies to become a professor.

Later after his health improved, he studied law and also tutored the children of families at three plantations; then at age thirty he entered journalism. He had been writing and publishing poems in The Southern Literary Messenger since 1848 at the age of twenty.

His first and only volume of poems published in his lifetime was printed in Boston in 1860, and later his friend, P. H. Hayne, edited his works and published them. The following poem, “Ode,” is Timrod’s most well known poem:

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth
The garlands of your fame are sown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, your sisters for the years
Which hold in trust your storied tombs,
Bring all they now can give—tears,
And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
As proudly on these wreaths today,
Than when some cannon-molded pile
Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!

The Fugitive poet Allen Tate’s most noted poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” was inspired by Timrod’s “Ode.”

Henry Timrod’s name recently surfaced when it was discovered that Bob Dylan had plagiarized some of Timrod’s poems in his most recent album, Modern Times. Unlike Allen Tate’s original poem which was legitimately inspired by Timrod’s poem, Dylan actually lifted lines the Civil War poet’s poems without even mentioning Timrod.

If you read Tate’s poem you do not find lines or images that are obviously taken verbatim form Timrod, but that is exactly what you find with Dylan’s plagiarism. Dylan fans have tried to whitewash the singer’s theft by calling it “the folk process,” but allusion is not the same as plagiarism.

Allusion assumes the reader is familiar with the work being referenced, but plagiarism assumes the reader is not aware of the work, and the plagiarizer puts forth the work as belonging to the plagiarist. Critic Christopher Ricks said, “plagiarism wants you not to know the original, whereas allusion wants you to know.”

Henry Timrod is certainly not as noted as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but he wrote some important poems about the Civil War. In his own lifetime his work was well received, and he was called the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy.

Reference:
The Poems of Henry Timrod an electronic book from the project Documenting the American South

The American Tradition in Literature Vol. 1, edited by Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long

“Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate

______________________________________________________________________________
Books by Linda Sue Grimes:


Singing in the Silence: Poems of Faith


Jiggery Jee's Eden Valley Stories
______________________________________________________________________________