James McIntyre | Biography

Perhaps English Canada's best-known bad poet, James McIntyre, is noteworthy for his verse celebration of the dairy industry. He was also one of the main subjects of William Arthur Deacon's Four Jameses (1927), a satiric study of mediocre Canadian literature.

Born in Forres, Morayshire, Scotland, McIntyre immigrated to Canada West, now Ontario, either in 1841 or after 1843; details of his early life are obscure. After some years probably spent as a farm laborer and later as a furniture dealer in St. Catherines, by 1858 he had established himself as an undertaker and a manufacturer and retailer of furniture in Ingersoll, where he would remain until his death. He had two children by his wife, Euphemia Fraser: Alexander, who died in 1876 after injuries sustained in his father's furniture factory, and Kate, who would herself publish a volume of execrable verse (Rhymes Right or Wrong of Rainy River, 1926), some written in defense of her father's poetry. Twenty years after his death she recalled him as a "Caledonian Bard, forty years a Free Mason and fifty years an Oddfellow, holder of all Veteran Jewels, Illuminated Adresses, Grand Master's Buckskin Apron, Ac. [sic]" (Bracebridge Gazette, 23 December 1926).

An occasional newspaper contributor of "rhymes on local subjects" beginning in at least 1858, McIntyre published his first collection of verses a quarter century later on topics (other than those listed in the full title of Musings, 1884) as various as Methodist Union, the typewriter, potato bugs, and electric light. His most celebrated accomplishment proved to be his "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7000 Pounds"; after its appearance McIntyre was moved to thank his acquaintances (in Musings) "who so highly appreciate the Cheese Ode" and, ambiguously, "the cheese buyers of the town who so liberally have assisted to render it a success." He would later observe, in Poems (1889), that Joachin Miller "hailed me as 'my dear poet of the Canadian pasture fields,' and he said I did wisely in singing of useful themes."

The headnote to McIntyre's second volume, the Poems, accurately reflects his major interests: "Fair Canada is our Theme, / Land of rich cheese, milk and cream." In Musings he had grappled with some aspects of literary nationalism: contrasting Robert Burns's use of Halloween, for example, with Canadian winter sports, or noting that thanks to lacrosse, "if a foe invade; we can / Drive them back with clubs Canadian." Fully the first half of Poems, however, deals exclusively with Canadian subjects, including six poems on Canadian authors and fourteen "dairy sketches." McIntyre's final collection in his lifetime (1891) is more heterogeneous, ranging from his much-derided "The Canadian Patriotic Hen," through a prediction of a future ten-ton cheese, to a prose essay on the cheese trade. It is also a bibliographical curiosity and, as such, usually overlooked. McIntyre had retained half the unbound sheets of Poems; paginating The Rise and Progress of the Canadian Cheese Trade consecutively after the index to Poems, he then had the two works bound together.

With the exception of Deacon's remarkable parody of academic literary criticism, most Canadian critics have either utterly ignored McIntyre or dismissed him as an eccentric. His generous modern editor, Roy A. Abrahamson, has termed him "the Chaucer of Cheese."