Sherry Chandler

No. Not Frank X. Walker or Maurice Manning. The “drunken poet of Danville” was the sobriquet of one Thomas Johnson, Jr., whose duodecimo pamphlet The Kentucky Miscellany was the first book of poetry, perhaps the first book, published in Kentucky. This 6¼-inch booklet that sold for “9 pence the copy” was first published in 1789, while Kentucky was still a county of Virginia, and went through three more editions: 1796, 1815, and 1821. Of all these books, only two copies of the 1821 edition survive. I was lucky enough to get a facsimile of this fourth edition through the University of Kentucky Libraries Occasional Papers.

Johnson’s verse was satire, one of Robert Graves’s two legitimate forms of poetry (the other being lyric). I think he saw himself working in the tradition of the great English satirists: Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Samuel Butler. “Hudibras,” mentioned in the poem below, was Butler’s great mock epic, which my Oxford Companion to English Literature describes as having “Rabelaisian touches.”

It seems appropriate, then, on this April Fool’s Day to open National Poetry Month with one of Tom Johnson’s satires, this one describing himself:

Hail Danville! Hail! where Johnson shines,
The hero of his blackguard rhymes;
Whose limber pen and polite brains,
Turns epic into dog’rel strains;
Who has ne’er plead true virtue’s cause,
Where merit never met applause;
Each noble act by him consign’d,
To low burlesque and dirty rhymes;
Where genius in the gingling skill,
Is chiefly drawn from whiskey stills;
In vice more fitting to decide,
As what himself has always try’d;
Like city parrot each passer by,
He calls whore and rogue, he knows not why.
Cites each Muse from numerous flocks,
That shelter in his matted locks —
To point their darts at gentility,
With genuine Billingsgate scurrility;
In Tyburn’s language better vers’d
Than e’er a Scotchman was in Erse.
If e’er a lady comes to town,
Johnson’s the first to run her down;
Disclaims against her frightful fashion,
Next at her virtue falls a lashing.
As fit a judger of the fair,
As hogs to deal in China ware;
Thinks every creature must proceed,
Like his dear self from spurious breed.
Whene’er I see a chattering Ape,
A brute that’s form’d in human shape,
By man despis’d; still more ill fated,
By whiskey quite debilitated—
Turn Poetaster to dispense
Whole vollies of his wit and sense;
…

Then falls a braying like an Ass,
And next out hops a Hudibras,
Deals as much in dirt and smut,
As chimney sweepers do in soot.
Took off his track, is lost at once,
And sinks into himself a dunce.
His last resort to ward off ills,
Is Hedge-hog like, by his own quills.
From man the Polecat sure must think,
Himself defended by his stink.

— Thomas Johnson, Jr. from The Kentucky Miscellany. A Facsimile of the Fourth Edition 1821 (University of Kentucky Libraries Occaional Papers Number 11)