Sherry Chandler

In 1932, Jesse Stuart left Vanderbilt. A dorm fire had destroyed all his possessions, his thesis, and his hopes for acceptance among the Agrarians and Fugitives. He returned to W Hollow vowing, according to William S. Ward, “I am going to write poetry to suit myself from now on.” In the year that followed, he wrote 702 sonnets that were published by E. P. Dutton in 1934 as Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow. This volume, which Ward calls the best poetry Stuart ever wrote, established his national reputation.

I have gone to some lengths to find a copy of Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow that is not locked up in a special collection. The copy I found in the Paris-Bourbon County library is a crumbling paperback reprint from 1959. The poems bring to mind the old word “poetaster,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “a writer of insignificant, meretricious, or shoddy poetry.”

At first I thought I would be embarrassed to publish one. But the poor old paperback poured its pages into my hand like a profligate, and I hate to have tormented it in vain. So this morning, I opened it at random to sonnet 424, which does strike me as having some power if very little discipline, typical of Stuart. It deals with the months he spent working a steel mill in Ashland.

424
He said farewell to steel—a long farewell.
He said farewell for he would not return.
It was all over and he had rebelled
To waste his body where the forge shops burn.
Farewell to all—the hammers in the rack;
The tongs and cleavers by the water hole;
The cinder cart and shovels on the track.
Farewell to furnaces so dark and cold—
It was all over now—he prayed to see
The time when all the sheds would turn to rust,
He prayed to see men going to the land
Before steel laid their bodies to the dust.
He said forever and a long farewell.
He said forever to his world of steel.