Can you write a 1500-1800 word english paper of the life of Langston Hughes the American poet and social activist The paper will need to follow an organizational plan as follows: An introduction that

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Student

English 1302, Section 00

Mr. David Pulling

__ June 20__

John Henry Bird: The Making of a Poet “Down on the Farm”

John Henry Bird is an obscure figure in twentieth century Louisiana literature, in spite of the fact that he published a collection of poems in the mid-1960’s that received positive critical acclaim from respected national experts. Growing up in the upper Ninth Ward in New Orleans during the Great Depression, Bird dabbled in writing beginning around World War II but never succeeded at publication. The most productive years in his writing career occurred between 1954 and 1962 when he moved to Folsom, Louisiana, to take over his uncle's dairy farm.  Working the farm gave Bird inspiration for many of his best-known poems.  Three of his best known poems from that most productive and critically-recognized period include "Old Daisy's Needs a'Milkin," "Ode to a Cow Pattie," and "Sweet Milk, Sour Milk."

PoetryWeb contributor Jerry V. Wayne explains what caused Bird to make the move from New Orleans to Folsom in 1954. Bird was 27 years old and working as a streetcar conductor in the City. His father’s brother, George Henry Bird, had moved across Lake Pontchartrain in the 1920’s and started the farm, where he raised watermelon and cantaloupe along with the dairy enterprise. Wayne notes that when John Henry was a child, he would spend happy weekends on his uncle’s farm and even stay for longer times during the summer. According to Wayne, “Summer visits of two and three weeks at a time were common” as the young Bird loved the country life and the industry of the dairy farm during that peak time of year when not only cow milking was going on, but also the watermelon and cantaloupe harvest (“Biography of John Henry Bird”).

Lastname 2 According to Wayne, when Uncle George Henry fell ill with heart trouble in 1954, he immediately called his nephew and “begged him to come take over” (“Biography”). John Henry needed little persuasion, as the farm had always held a special attraction for him. So in September that year, John Henry resigned his position with the Transit Authority and moved to Folsom where his talent as a poet would achieve the fullest bloom of his career.

Critic and poetry reviewer Louise D. Mason believes the factor that made the difference between the undistinguished poems Bird wrote in the City and the creative energy shown in the country poems was the natural and stimulating environment of the farm. Mason explains how the country life awakened the poet’s creative instincts:

In the city, Bird was surrounded by tall buildings and crowds of anonymous people; in the country, he lived in a farmhouse overlooking forty acres of sprawling green pasture with an idyllic pond in the foreground and a herd of dairy cattle leisurely grazing the hills. His soul was awakened to depths of poetic insight never imagined in the crowded city (134).

One of the first poems that Bird wrote in that era was “Old Daisy Needs a’Milkin’” in January 1955. Mason believes this is the poem that “put Bird over the top” of his former doubts and insecurities as a poet (135). He drafted and dabbled with the poem over a period of two or three days after he was amused one afternoon by the bell cow’s clanging bell that woke him from a light nap. Bird later laughed, “You could always set your watch by that cow bell, for every afternoon at 3:45, here comes that herd of cows for their afternoon milking, the bell cow leading the way” (qtd. in Mason 135). The poem begins “Here comes Daisy / she needs a milkin’ / I can tell by the bell (1-3). The terse brevity of the four-syllable lines and the internal rhyme in line 3 give the poem the feel of structure and closed form, even though Lastname 3 the poem is written in free verse. The poems Bird wrote before moving to the farm were almost always written in iambic tetrameter with abab rhyme schemes. Mason suggests that just as the open countryside provided free roam for Bird’s vision of the scenery, so the rural setting provided “free roam for his understanding of poetic structure” (135).

Bird’s growth and development as a poet did not end with “Old Daisy.” “Ode on a Cow Pattie,” composed in the summer of 1956, marks the beginning of what Wayne characterized as “another developmental phase” when Bird began composing humorous parodies of well-known classics, in this case John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Biography”). Rather than an ode to a staid relic, as Keats’s classical urn, Bird chose for his subject matter the common piles of dried cow poop that dotted his pastures. Compare Keats’s opening lines to Birds’. Keats’ poem begins, “Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time” (1-2). Bird’s “Ode” imitates Keats’ iambic pentameter but satirizes the subject matter: “Thou foul odor’d piece of pasture dung, / Thou by-product of bovine digestion” (1-2). In this poem, Mason believes that Bird demonstrates for the first time in his body of work the technical skill of adapting the classic patterns of meter and rhyme scheme. In fact, “Ode to a Cow Pattie” was Bird’s first poem written in iambic pentameter, and even though the poem is light-hearted and satirical, the technical skill Bird demonstrates, according to Mason, is “sophisticated” (138-39).

Other poems were well-received in this time and in the next few years as Bird continued writing and publishing, mainly in the Thursday entertainment section of the St. Tammany Farmer, the local newspaper of Folsom and surrounding area. Almost Lastname 4 all critics agree, though, that Bird reached his highest point of achievement in 1960 with composition of “Sweet Milk, Sour Milk.” As “Ode to a Cow Pattie” was a parody of an ode, so was “Sweet Milk, Sour Milk” a take-off on the structure and form of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” Like Shelley’s classic, Bird’s poem is arranged five sections, I, II, III, IV, and V and uses highly refined diction and style. Unlike Shelley’s classic, of course, Bird’s subject matter is mundane and satirical. The comparison between the ending couplets of Shelley’s Part I with the ending couplet of Bird’s Part I shows the satirical mockery of tone and subject matter. Shelley wrote, “Wild Spirit, which thou art moving everywhere; / Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!” (13-14). Note how Bird’s lines 13-14 mimic even the mechanical details of the classic: “Sour Milk, which thou art spoiling here and there; / Buttermilk and yogurt; stench, oh stench! (13-14). Mason also points out that “Sweet Milk, Sour Milk” is Bird’s longest poem, consisting of 70 lines of iambic pentameter (141).

Bird’s life on the farm and his writing career both ended in the fall of 1962 when Bird suffered a debilitating stroke. Mason chronicles the sadness of the end to that era as Bird was forced to spend the final four years of his life as an invalid in a nursing home in New Orleans: “Without the farm, without his health, John Henry Bird’s poetic voice fell silent. The Louisiana literary tradition lost one of its brightest luminaries of the mid-twentieth century as infirmity robbed the poet of his once-fertile imagination” (145). Bird passed away in 1968 and was buried in the corner of the pasture where he wrote so many of his poems. Fortunately, those poems have Lastname 5 been preserved in The Complete Works of John Henry Bird compiled by Southeastern Louisiana University in 1969.

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Works Cited

Bird, John Henry. “Ode to a Cow Pattie.” The Complete Works of John Henry Bird.

Hammond: Southeast La. UP, 1969. 47. Print.

---. “Old Daisy Needs a’Milkin’.” The Complete Works of John Henry Bird.

Hammond: Southeast La. UP, 1969. 50. Print.

---. “Sweet Milk, Sour Milk.” The Complete Works of John Henry Bird.

Hammond: Southeast La.UP, 1969. 59. Print.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Bartelby.Com. Bartleby.Com. 1999. Web. 05 June

2013.

Mason, Louise D. “John Henry Bird’s Agrarian Poems.” Critical Essays on 20th Century Poetry

of the American Deep South. Atlanta: U of Georgia P, 1999. 130-145. Print.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ode to the West Wind.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 10th

ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012. 756-57. Print.

Wayne, Jerry V. “Biography of John Henry Bird.” PoetryWeb. American Poetry Institute. n.d.
Web. 01 June 2013.