Henry Timrod: A Life of Sorrow and Song

Always in love with every pretty face but jobless and penniless with the coming of the Civil War, Henry Timrod was finally engaged but too poor to marry. In an effort to make money, he joined the military but was a reluctant soldier who became a war correspondent for South Carolina’s Charleston Mercury when he left for the Western front in 1862. After reporting from northeast Mississippi for less than three months, the desperately ill poet staggered back to South Carolina. He spent the last years of the war yearning for peace and writing newspaper editorials interspersed with poetry about suffering and tragedy. The horror of the war, tuberculosis and unrelenting poverty overwhelmed the struggling poet in 1867 when he died at age 38. Timrod is an important 19th century Southern poet who has been compared to better known writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. His poetry, which is usually included in Southern studies and most anthologies of American poetry, was resurrected in August 2006 when Bob Dylan “borrowed” extensively from Timrod’s poetry for the lyrics of his best-selling album "Modern Times.” Dylan never gave any credit for the words that had been covered with Timrod’s life blood more than a century and a half ago and helped Dylan win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.