~Happy 184th Birthday Henry Timrod~

Good afternoon everyone! Hope you are all enjoying your lazy Sunday afternoon as I am. It's a little bit nasty outside, but inside the candles are lit, I'm sipping on a Big K Cola (because I'm a poor white college kid), and I'm ready to knock out another day of this birthday celebration blog. So who are we celebrating today you might ask? (as if you didn't read the title of the post) Well, today s the birthday of Dwight Howard, but he makes you sick too right? What about Nicki Minaj? More like Nicki Manot! We could even celebrate the beloved Ann Coulter for it is her birthday today as well, but she's just a terrible person so I will save that for never. No, today we take a look back to the early/mid 1800's and celebrate a poet named Henry Timrod.

Credit: www.thetimrodlibrary.org

  I would kill for his mustache! 96,776,196 minutes ago from the time I started this post, Mr. Henry Timrod was born. The year was 1828, the location was Charleston, South Carolin, which is where Stephen Colbert grew up AND where Andy Dick was born. Fun Facts! Henry was of a German emigrated family and his father was a poet himself. His father died while Henry was just nine years old, and only a short few years after his death, their house burned down, making his family impoverished. He had a short stent at the University of Georgia, but after becoming ill, was forced to move back to Charleston and find a new profession. He took up becoming a lawyer and starting his own law practice while at the same time he wrote poems. Seemingly flowing with poems, he quite his job as a lawyer calling it "distasteful" and continued his work as a writer/poet.

   He really began to come to fame during the American Civil War period and his poems even caused many young men to enlist into the Confederacy! His famous poems from that time are "Ethnogenesis", "A Cry to Arms", Carolina", and "Kaite". He even joined himself and served as a private in Company B, 20th South Carolina Infantry. Like when he was in school, he had to leave the service because he fell ill once again. After the service he settled in Columbia, South Carolina, where he married Katie, the one he wrote a poem about. These two had a child born on Christmas Eve, which is extremely awesome in my opinion! His closing years were pretty depressing. His newspaper office he had was destroyed during that war and the aftermath caused his family to be in severe poverty. Once again illness got the best of him and once again trying to be in a newspaper office, but that place folded. His son died shortly after, followed by Henry himself because of consumption in 1867.

His poems are relatively long compared to the last poet I talked about, so I won't provide you one on here, but feel free to go onto a cool website with a lot of information on poets and check his work out. I recommend reading "Katie" because it's really cute and I personally loved it!  CHECK IT OUT

QUOTES

• "Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court with green festoons The banks of dark lagoons." 
• "Each has its lesson; for our dreams in sooth, come they in shape of demons, gods, or elves, are allegories with deep hearts of truth that tell us solemn secrets of ourselves."
• "Spring is a true reconstructionist."