Byron Herbert Reece Sonnet Gathers Again to Shining in

Byron Herbert Reece was the writer of four books of poesy and two novels. During his short career he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, earned ii Guggenheim awards, and served every bit writer-in-residence at the Academy of California at Los Angeles, Emory University in Atlanta, and Immature Harris Higher in Towns Canton. Lauded by theAtlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill as "one of the really great poets of our time, and one to stand with those of any other fourth dimension," Reece never achieved wide recognition. He is known today as the poet whose quondam-fashioned, finely crafted ballads and lyrics celebrate the life and heritage of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Reece was born in Union County near Claret Mountain on September 14, 1917, to Emma and Juan Reece. He entered a family that had a long connection to the rur al mountain world. The Reeces had lived in the expanse since the early 1800s and were firmly rooted in the mount culture. The young Reece, nicknamed "Hub," showed his talents early. By the start form he had read the Bible and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), texts that would influence his writing. Past the historic period of fifteen, he was publishing poems in the local Blairsville paper. After loftier school he attended nearby Young Harris College, a small, private two-yr school, where he plant a coterie of friends who encouraged his poetic development.

Reece'due south start effort at college was short-lived because he needed to devote his fourth dimension to farming. After working on the family unit farm for three years, he was able to render with a scholarship and permission to alternate quarters between farm work and schoolwork. Despite these accommodations, he never finished his two-twelvemonth degree.

Career

In 1943 Reece's poetic endeavors took a major step forward when Jesse Stuart, a well-known writer from Kentucky, "discovered" him. When Reece's poem "Lest the Lonesome Bird" appeared in the Prairie Schooner journal, Stuart was intrigued past the ballad skills of the young poet. Stuart asked Reece to show him more poems and persuaded his publisher, E. P. Dutton, to publish the young Georgian's work. In 1945 Reece's start collection of poems, Ballad of the Bones and Other Poems, appeared to critical praise.

The side by side 10 years proved fruitful for Reece. While Ballad of the Bones attracted national attention, Bow Down in Jericho (1950) earned Reece a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Newsweek magazine featured him in its January 1, 1951, outcome. Too during this period Ralph McGill, the executive editor (and later, publisher) of the Atlanta Constitution, became a friend of Reece's and an advocate of his piece of work.

The first of Reece's two novels, Better a Dinner of Herbs, was published in 1950. This volume and The Hawk and the Sun (1955) constitute all of Reece's published fiction, though he apparently was planning to write a trilogy of novels about the settlement of northward Georgia—plans thwarted past his last illness. Better a Dinner of Herbs narrates the journey of two brothers down from the mountains to the lowlands. Its Erstwhile Testament story of dearest, murder, and retribution takes on the bones tone of the carol form that dominates Reece's poesy. The Hawk and the Lord's day narrates events leading up to a lynching in a small-scale Georgia town. Both novels are distinctive and highly original.

Although Reece's concluding two volumes of verse, A Song of Joy (1952) and The Season of Flesh (1955), were also praised, his traditional mode was out of footstep with the Beat and confessional poets who dominated the literary world. Unlike the work of near writers, Reece's poesy showed little alter or development in his four volumes; his poetic forms (most notably the carol and the lyric), his themes, and his indicate of view seem to have been fully formed past the time he reached the age of 20.

Nearly all of Reece's poetry deals with ane of four themes—nature, expiry, beloved, and religion. In course the poems vary from short lyrics, sequences of couplets or quatrains, to sonnets and longer ballads. "A Vocal of Sorrow" summons farmers from their fields to assistance a adult female mourn the loss of her girl:

O men, come in from the field and the lane
And pray over Sarah's 1 daughter again
For she is possessed of a terrible hurting.

O men, come in and softly abide
In reverent silence with your knees spread wide
For Sarah'due south ane daughter has suffered and died.

O men, come in from the field and the plough
And option at your teeth with the tip of a bender,
And say to her kindly brave words for tomorrow
For Sarah's possessed of a sad sorrow.

"I Go by Ways of Rust and Flame" describes the solitude of the individual in nature. Its speaker "walk[s] alone as all men must / Upon the roads of flame and rust." Some longer poems business concern the traditional content of folk ballads: murder, jealousy, disappointment in love. "Lest the Lonesome Bird," "Ballad of the Rider," and "Ballad of the Weaver" are examples. Other long poems retell biblical stories: "Carol of the Bones" recasts the tale of Ezekiel, and a sequence of poems in Bow Downward in Jericho is about the Old Testament figures of David and Jonathan.

I of Reece's most constructive expressions of fidelity to his n Georgia region was his poem "Roads," which compares the relative virtues of life in the metropolis and the land. The poem comments on the "roofs of iron" and "sheer perpendiculars of steel" that narrate the architecture of the metropolis, along with the hard "streets that trample the state heel." In the metropolis, Reece writes,

My heart'due south contracted to a stone.
Therefore whatever roads repair
To cities on the plainly, my own
Lead upward to the peaks; and there
I experience, pushing my ribs autonomously,
The broad sky entering my heart.

Reece keeps a narrow focus on the solitary individual's human relationship to the earth. The individual, whether looking at nature, decease, dearest, or religion, removes the veil of community to see with his eyes alone; the narrator is not a farmer or a mountaineer or a poet, merely a private human alone to confront the globe, a earth that can exist cute and horrific.

Death and Legacy

Reece's professional successes were first by personal strife—farm life was hard, his female parent died of tuberculosis, and his father barbarous sick with the disease. Reece contracted tuberculosis while caring for his parents. During his final years, Reece also taught classes at Immature Harris College to earn actress money. On June 3, 1958, he committed suicide at the historic period of forty. He was establish in his role, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart playing on the record role player and his final set of student papers graded and neatly stacked in the desk-bound drawer.

In 2001 Reece was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Two years later the Byron Herbert Reece Society was formed, with poet and Reece biographer Bettie Sellers among its inaugural members. In 2004 the Reece family farm was acquired past Union Canton and leased to the lodge, which began work to create a museum and interpretive center commemorating the poet's life and work. A number of Georgia writers, including Sellers, Terry Kay, and Reece biographer Raymond Melt, gathered on the site in June 2008 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Reece's death.

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Source: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/byron-herbert-reece-1917-1958/

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