Poet of North Georgia

Abstract

HISTORICAL AUTHOR—BYRON HERBERT REECE Poet of North Georgia_________________ Hugh Ruppersburg Virtually unknown outside his native state of Georgia, Byron Herbert Reece had a career as a poet and novelist that barely spanned two decades. As his biographer Raymond Cook observes, "Reece wrote nearly all of his poetry in the basic, traditional forms of the past, but to the couplet, the four-line stanza, the ballad, and the sonnet he brought a freshness that is nearly always unmistakably his own" (140). Compared with the modernist verse of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and other leading English language poets of the twentieth century, his poems—reminiscent of the balladry of Robert Burns and the somber lyrics of Thomas Hardy—seemed old fashioned and sentimental, deceptively simplistic. He disliked the modernists and scorned the critics who praised their work and ignored his. His two novels—dark, lyrical narratives about life and death in the North Georgia Mountains—received even less attention than his poetry. Reece was born in 1917 at the foot of Blood Mountain, eleven miles south of Blairsville, Georgia. He did not see an automobile until he was eight years old. His father Juan was a farmer. His mother Emma taught him to read when he was very young, and he gave early evidence of an unusual intelligence. After graduating second in his high school class in Blairsville, Georgia, he enrolled at Young Harris College. His father's illness forced him to return home to work the family farm, and for the next few years he took classes intermittently, taught elementary school, farmed, and wrote. He never graduated— apparently because he refused to take required courses in French and mathematics. In 1937 he saw the first publication of one of his poems. Late in 1939 his work came to the attention of Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGiIl, who became a friend and promoted Reece for the rest of his life. In 1943 Kentucky novelist Jesse Stuart read Reece's work and was so impressed that he convinced his publisher, E. P. Dutton, to publish Reece's first collection of poems, Ballad ofthe Bones (1945). It was followed by Better a Dinner ofHerbs (novel, 1950), Bow Down in Jericho (verse, 1950), A Song ofJoy (verse, 1952), The Hawk and the Sun (novel, 1955), and The Season ofFlesh (verse, 1955), all published by Dutton. 64 Published in nationally prominent journals, and occasionally featured in leading newspapers or magazines (such as Newsweek), Reece never became widely known. Self-effacing and reticent, weighed down by family responsibilities and physical illness, he had little energy or inclination for promoting his own work. He did earn occasional honors. He was cited for his writing five times by the Georgia Writers Association, won an annual award from American Poet magazine in 1943, received two Guggenheim awards, and was asked to teach as poet-in-residence at UCLA, where he was unhappy and unable to write. He also taught briefly as poet-in-residence at Emory University and for several stints at Young Harris College. In 1954 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1958, struggling with depression, financial pressures, and disease, he committed suicide. Although Reece's poetry and fiction make clear that he had devoted himself to writing about his native region—his work is often set in the mountains or the rural countryside—it evokes a broadly drawn rural, pastoral landscape laced with sorrow, lost love, death, and grief, and not always geographically distinct or identifiable. His literary and political conservatism is evident in his choice of traditional poetic forms, in his subject matter, and in his attitudes. His poem "Roads" (from Bow Down in Jericho) contrasts the hurly-burly life of the city with the rural mountain existence he preferred. He describes the "highways racing east and west" and "the busy traffic roar" of "Heet tourists bound on far behests / And monstrous mastodons of freight." Though he expresses ironic awe ("I name them great and wonderful") for the roads and their speeding traffic, the roaring trucks, all headed towards the "cities whose extended pull / They have no choice but to convey," he confesses his true allegiance: My heart is native to the sky Where hills that are...