The poems of Frank O. Ticknor, M.D - Primary Source Edition
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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The Poems of Francis Orray Ticknor (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Poems of Francis Orray Ticknor
When the...)
Excerpt from The Poems of Francis Orray Ticknor
When the Civil War grew from fear into a reality, he espoused the cause of the Confederacy. Dr. C. Alphonso Smith says: He was a man of rooted convictions, but without bitterness. The prayer of his heart was for peace, as in 'ora Pace.' SO kindly was his nature, that even during the awful days of Reconstruction his word-painting of men and matters of the times contain no violent harangues. They were for the most part harmless caricatures Of incidents, many now forgotten, which appealed to his sense of humor. His soul was able to rise above the turbulent times, and sing.
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Francis Orray Ticknor was an American poet and physician.
Background
Francis was born on November 13, 1822 at Fortville, Jones County, Ga. He was the son of a Connecticut physician, Dr. Orray Ticknor, who had settled in Savannah and there married Harriet Coolidge of Norwich Town, Connecticut.
He was a descendant of William Ticknor who was in Scituate in 1646. After Dr. Ticknor's death in 1823, Mrs. Ticknor removed to Columbus, Ga. , where she reared and educated her three children.
Education
Francis, after completing his schooling in Massachusetts, studied medicine in Philadelphia and New York, spent a year (1842) in Norwich Town, received the degree of M. D. at the Philadelphia College of Medicine in 1843.
Career
In Georgia he began to practise at Shell Creek, Muscogee County. About 1850 he settled at "Torch Hill, " seven miles south of Columbus, and followed the busy existence of a country doctor, finding time nevertheless for such major passions as the cultivation of fruits and flowers (with infrequent articles thereon for the Southern Cultivator) and the writing of poetry, and such minor ones as music and drafting.
The verses which he contributed to newspapers or obscure periodicals won him some local reputation before the war years which saw his nature deepen and his poetic powers develop; but he was careless of literary fame, and, although certain of his pieces had found a place in the anthologies of Southern war poetry, it was five years after his death before an incomplete collection of his work appeared in volume form. This posthumous publication shows the range of his poetic interests to have been essentially that of his Southern colleagues, but, despite their unevenness and other occasional limitations, even the conventional lyrics about roses and humming-birds reveal a feeling for artistic structure, a graceful prosody, an incisive and effective turn of phrase which are well above the average of the day and which furnish ground for the assumption that with more leisure, more criticism, more encouragement, Ticknor might readily have secured a considerably higher place among the American poets.
As it was, he reached full stature only in his poems on martial and chivalrous themes, with their simple and direct narrative, dramatic intensity, and noticeable compactness of style. "Little Giffen, " based on an actual incident during Ticknor's supervision of the Confederate hospital work in Columbus, and easily his best-known poem, can bear comparison with any other American heroic ballad, yet such war verses as "The Virginians of the Valley" and "Loyal" (his tribute to General Cleburne) are not markedly inferior to it.
His grand-daughter (Michelle C. Ticknor) attributes to him the authorship of the anonymous "The Barefooted Boys, " one of the most spirited and memorable of all the Civil War poems, but does not undertake to prove Ticknor's title to this tremendously powerful lyric which may well have come from his pen.
He died in middle life, partly in consequence of his unremitting devotion to duty.
Posterity has unduly neglected his work, as did his generation, yet various poets whose names are better known might have learned much from him.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Personality
He was genial, humane, unselfish.
Quotes from others about the person
The epitaph which he wrote for the title character in his humorous poem, "The Farmer Man, " further sums up his own career: "He read the Bible, loved his wife loved God, his neighbor, and his home. "
Connections
On January 18, 1847, he married Rosalie Nelson, daughter of Thomas Maduit Nelson of Virginia, an officer in the War of 1812 and subsequently a member of Congress. He and his wife had six sons and two daughters.