August 2, 2007
America’s Worst Poet Ever? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 06:20 PM EST At least Julia A. Moore enjoys the tribute of immortal infamy. For my money, John F. Bair was as bad a poet as ever lived, yet no one remembers him today. I know of him because an autographed copy of The Complete Poetical Works of Rev. John Franklin Bair, 684 pages long, published in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1907, was left to me by my grandmother, who had treasured it for most of the twentieth century. Bair’s range is positively Shakespearean, from two quatrains about a humble farmyard scene . . . There was a lot, there was a hen,
There was a garden, shoo!
The man into his garden went,
Then hen she went in too. Down he stooped and seized a stone,
The hen cried, Gookle goo!
The stone descended from his hand,
The hen descended too. . . . to the 74-page epic “Drucilla,” with this stirring scene of Captain Long leaving to fight in the Spanish-American War:
The beautiful city of Frisco now many miles in the distance,
Now it has faded completely, nought can they see now but water,
Tears very freely are flowing as the boys think of their loved ones;
Many are seized with sea sickness, see them lean over the railing,
Pouring libations to Neptune time after time from their stomachs.
Weary, they lie down and slumber, morning dawns, they are no better,
Nothing will stay in their stomachs, never saw anything like it.
Day after day thus they suffer as they glide over the ocean. Bair does not fear to address in rhyme the burning issues of the day, and sometimes his words may even be taken as prophetic: “The plague, the plague, halloo, hey, hey!/ Just see ’tis coming right this way/ Across the Atlantic Ocean route/ And we’ve no fence to keep it out!/ That plague is foreign immigration/ From ev’ry European nation,/ They’re coming, thickly, more and more,/ Each year to fair Columbia’s shore . . ./ Let the ballots of one and all/ Be used to build a monstrous wall . . ./ Let that wall be so high and strong/ That it may turn that endless throng/ Of lawless criminals away/ From our fair shores now and alway.” And he knows how to find the moral lessons in history. In his poem “Ohio’s Presidents,” he writes of Rutherford B. Hayes, “I adore him because, like a Christian so true,/ One brave noble act he determined to do,/ ’Twas to always discard the use of the wine/ Whenever with guests he would sit down and dine.” He later adds, “James Garfield, like Hayes, discarded the wine/ Whenever, with guests, he sat down to dine,/ He went to his work and with all his might/ He firmly stood up for that which was right,” before greeting the election of William McKinley with, “But we hope that he too like James A. Garfield,/ To wine and dishonesty never will yield,/ But that every time he sits down to dine/ He too will discourage the use of the wine./ We hope that McKinley successful will be,/ And that from distress we will ever be free,/ May the blessings of heaven upon him descend/ And guide and direct him till his term shall end.” He does not touch on President Grant’s drinking or not in his earlier passage on that Ohioan. Bair was such a complete poet that even lack of inspiration was inspiration: One entire poem reads, “I’m tired and I’m sleepy,/ My mind will not work right,/ So I’ve about concluded/ I’ll write no more tonight.” Should such a bard be forgotten?
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