Ernest Walsh Biography

Ernest Walsh, expatriate American poet and coeditor of the small, but influential, experimental magazine This Quarter, was born in Detroit, Michigan. As a child he lived in Cuba, where his father, James Walsh, was a tea and coffee wholesaler. After the family returned to Detroit, his father died, and Walsh subsequently ran away from home at the age of fourteen. At seventeen he was diagnosed as tubercular and spent two years in a sanatorium at Lake Saranac, New York, from which he was discharged, supposedly cured. From 1914 to 1917 he wandered about the country in and out of work. Finally he enlisted in the army as an air cadet, and he was severely injured in the crash of the plane he was piloting during a training flight in Texas. The lung damage that he suffered as a result of the accident was complicated by the consumption from which he had never recovered.

Walsh began writing poetry while undergoing treatment at the United States Public Health Service Hospital #64 at Camp Kearney, California, in 1921. Fortunately he came to the attention of Harriet Monroe, who published four of his poems in her magazine Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for January 1922. Then, pronounced incurable and dismissed from the hospital with a government pension, he decided to spend his few remaining years in Europe living among the writers and artists he admired. Armed with letters of introduction from Monroe to Ezra Pound and other writers, Walsh journeyed to Paris. There, installed at the fashionable Claridge Hotel, his belongings impounded because he could not pay his bill, he was befriended by Ethel Moorhead, a Scottish painter and suffragette, who became his friend and benefactress.

Together they determined to publish a quarterly of their own, one which would "publish the artist's work while it is still fresh." The first issue of This Quarter appeared in January 1925, and it was dedicated to Ezra Pound, "who by his creative work, his editorship of several magazines, his helpful friendship for young and unknown artists, his many and untiring efforts to win better appreciation of what is first-rate in art comes first to our mind as meriting the gratitude of this generation." Published here were works by H. D., Kay Boyle, Gertrude Stein, Emanuel Carnevali, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams. The second issue included an extract of James Joyce's Work in Progress, the evolving opus which was to become Finnegans Wake (1939). The magazine attracted a good deal of attention because of its fresh critical stance and its rebellious denunciation of the literary establishment. Walsh, however, was able to edit only the first two numbers of the journal, for in Monte Carlo on 16 October 1926, nursed by his friends Ethel Moorhead and Kay Boyle, he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one and was buried in Monaco. The third issue of This Quarter, published by Ethel Moorhead as a memorial to her coeditor, contains a blistering editorial accusing Pound of ignoring Walsh and his magazine and retracting the extravagant dedication printed in the first number. After Walsh's death Boyle, who had lived with him during the last year of his life and had assisted him in his editorial duties, gave birth to his daughter. Boyle's second novel, Year Before Last (1932), is based in part on her romance with Walsh in the months prior to his death. In addition the material which she appended to her edition of Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together (1968) is a moving recollection of their time together and the subsequent birth of their daughter.

Virtually all of Walsh's poems that were published in the twenties appeared in the pages of Poetry and This Quarter. Eight years after his death they were collected and published with a memoir by Ethel Moorhead, but the edition sold only 500 copies and was out of print within two years. His poetry consists of short lyrics written, with the exception of some experimental sonnets, in free verse. The subject matter is frequently erotic, and the imagery is shockingly vivid and sensual. "Leave that sow your mother," he blusters in "Venus In A Pension," a bold restatement of the carpe diem theme, "before your buttocks / are no longer bold / And your belly / is the concern / of three doctors / and one nurse / Rather than one poet / and many songs / ... / I will make a song for you / like a white screen / On which the words / are written / beautiful / and strange / as / sleep." Other verses are encomiums to the circle of literary acquaintances whom Walsh admired, including Pound, Carnevali, and Hemingway. Toward the end of his short career Walsh showed signs of a maturing poetic genius, and he developed an easy, conversational style which is fresh and compelling. His experiments with language also include poems written in a pseudoarchaic English. An example is "Sonnete," which begins, "She is a powdery morsel bond titely / In brite colers. I expectt her to explode / Into a shower of lingerie anytime."

Walsh's editorials and reviews of such books as Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) and McAlmon's Distinguished Air (1925), published in the first three issues of This Quarter, attack the literary establishment, which he variously defines as the Dial, the New Criterion, Poetry, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats. He praises what he feels is a new, lively breed of writers. "Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Robert McAlmon, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, and Emanuel Carnevali," he declares, "are the six greatest living literary artists"; "unrhymed verse, everything else being equal, is always superior to rhymed verse"; and T.S. Eliot, an historian rather than a critic, "has been dead a long time." Such criticism is, like Walsh himself, erratic and extravagant, but it is also perceptive and vigorous. After his death the magazine was published from 1929 to 1932 under the more conservative editorship of Edward Titus, but it had lost its lively appeal.

The significance of Ernest Walsh's contribution to American literature is in part historical, for as editor of This Quarter he published writers of greater stature than his own. However, the value of his poetry may not be discounted. Produced during a span of only five years, it is limited in its breadth, but many of the poems, particularly his last ones, possess a fresh and enduring quality that should recommend them to contemporary readers.