Background
Ernest Walsh, the son of James and Sara Lampson Walsh, was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States, on August 10, 1895, but spent his early years in Cuba where his father operated a tea and coffee wholesale business.
Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, United States
Ernest Walsh attended writing course at Columbia University.
Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, United States
Ernest Walsh attended writing course at Columbia University.
https://www.amazon.com/Poems-sonnets-Ernest-Walsh/dp/B00085U0W0
1934
Ernest Walsh, the son of James and Sara Lampson Walsh, was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States, on August 10, 1895, but spent his early years in Cuba where his father operated a tea and coffee wholesale business.
When Ernest's family returned to Detroit from Cuba, his father died, the family's finances shrivelled, and Walsh left home at the age of fourteen. He worked odd jobs for three years, fell ill, was hospitalized with tuberculosis and spent two years in a sanatorium in New York. Given a clean bill of health, Walsh worked for a time at a print shop, then at a cafeteria, and then he began writing. He attended writing course at Columbia University.
After a writing course at Columbia University, Walsh and a friend worked their way cross-country, often earning their keep by virtue of Walsh's amusing manner of speech and wit.
In 1917, Walsh was sent to Texas for training as an aviation service cadet. He was almost killed when the plane he was piloting crashed, crushing him and further damaging his still-tubercular lungs. Walsh spent much of the following four years in various military hospitals with hemorrhaging lungs, and he began writing poems about his life and illness. In August, 1921, he sent some of his work to a poetry magazine editor in Chicago named Harriet Moore. Moore accepted four of his poems for publication. She further supported him by facilitating a disabled veteran's pension and a monthly allowance after military doctors pronounced him incurable; she also wrote letters of introduction for him to Ezra Pound and others in Paris, where Walsh intended to spend his remaining years in the company of artists and writers he admired.
In Paris, Pound showed Walsh how to edit his poems and introduced him to other writers, but his lung hemorrhages persisted. Walsh was unable to write much during this period; his pension not having arrived, he was unable to pay his bill at Claridge's fashionable hotel. His impounded belongings were retrieved for him by his new friend, Ethel Moorhead, a well-to-do Scottish suffragette (and writer) who was to care for him and finance him until the end. Walsh and Moorhead traveled Europe for a year, looking for a healthy climate, and he wrote mostly short, lyrical, and depressed poetry about the world he was moving through: "a dying stream / watched by fishermen with anxious eyes."
Walsh met Harriet Monroe again, in Edinburgh; she agreed to publish more of his poems. Finding the dampness of Scotland disagreeable, Walsh in 1924 returned to the United States and, in the warm climate of San Diego, California, "a great romance flared up" (in Monroe's words). Walsh's poems became more sensual than before, and he focused on American places and persons like Carl Sandburg and Ezra Pound.
Back in Paris later that year, Moorhead funded a new and experimental magazine called This Quarter so that Walsh would have a home for his poetry and his ideas about modern literature. Walsh's editorial policy was to encourage new writers to publish their works unedited and to oppose "literary politics and literary politicians," such as T. S. Eliot who represented "a tradition without individuality." The first issue was dedicated to Ezra Pound for, among other things, "his helpful friendship for young and unknown artists," and it included works by Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and William Carlos Williams, not to mention works by Walsh, Moorhead, and Kay Boyle (who was to become the third major woman in Walsh's life).
The second and third issues of This Quarter included excerpts from a work in progress by James Joyce (later published as Finnegans Wake) and poems by Ezra Pound. Walsh's poems continued to reflect the immediacy of his life, holding up the sensuousness of physical lovemaking, for example, against the imminence of his own death: "holding my head to her breast / she might have been telling a dead man her love." The magazine became noted for its critical stance and its rebelliousness.
Walsh edited only the first two issues of his journal; in late 1925 a medical board examination (required by his pension arrangements) ordered absolute rest. Bedridden for three months, living with Kay Boyle in the south of France (and still financed by Moorhead), Walsh experimented with an invented language: "Bacon andde Come andde potatos andde pees / Brewe inne the barel to drink as ye plese / A saucye yongge thinge to holde andde to squeese / With a dimple inne mor than her prety knees" ("A Songge for Merrie Companye"). Marianne Moore rejected the only of these poems Walsh sent her, but Michael Gold published several in the New Masses, and the rest made their way into the third issue of This Quarter after Walsh died.
Walsh spent his last several months nursed by both Moorhead and Boyle in Moorhead's Monte Carlo villa, but successive hemorrhages weakened him to the point of death on October 16, 1926. Moorhead made the third issue of This Quarter a memorial to Walsh. Boyle memorialized Walsh's last months (and their romance) in her 1932 novel Year Before Last, and again in her 1968 edition of Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together. In 1934 Moorhead edited and published all Walsh's poetry (and her memoir of him) in a volume called Poems and Sonnets.
Ernest Walsh believed that writers needed to be truly innovative, not merely meeting the demands of the literary establishment.
Walsh had a flamboyant personality which attracted the attention and support of three women, also writers, who enabled him to pursue creative activities despite his debilitating illness.
Physical Characteristics: Walsh died of tuberculosis.
Quotes from others about the person
Sylvia Beach: "Walsh knew he had but a few months to live and he had decided to come to Paris to spend the time remaining to him among the writers he admired. He dreamed of making a name for himself as a poet, which was more difficult. There was something very fine about Ernest Walsh; he was alive and he was heroic".
Ernest Walsh formed a relationship with Kay Boyle, with whom he had a daughter, Sharon, named for the Rose of Sharon, born in March 1927, five months after Walsh's death from tuberculosis in October 1926.
(born in March 1927)
(February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992)
Kay Boyle was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and O. Henry Award winner.
