Background

Walter Malone was born on February 10, 1866, in De Soto County, Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee. He was the son of Dr. Franklin Jefferson and Mary Louisa (Hardin) Malone.

Education

During the period of his education, which was principally at the University of Mississippi, where he studied law and was graduated with the degree of Ph. B. in 1887, Malone did much independent studying and writing.

Career

At sixteen, Malone published Claribel and Other Poems, tramping the countryside to secure subscribers. In this, as in The Outcast and Other Poems (1886), there was, amid much that was grandiloquent and derivative, an unusual facility coupled with a serious predilection for the larger forms of verse and some leaning toward native materials.

Admitted to the bar in 1887, he moved to Memphis and practised law with his brother, James H. Malone, meanwhile serving during 1888 as city editor of the Memphis Public Ledger and writing poetry. Of a somewhat reserved, but gentle and sensitive temperament, he matured slowly as a poet. In Narcissus and Other Poems (1892), Songs of Dusk and Dawn (1894), and Songs of December and June (1896) his verse did not escape the savorlessness of current models; but it was precise, serious, and profuse in imagery.

There were occasional metrical experiments and frank bursts of passion and melancholy, reflecting his loneliness in the contemporary scene. After writing a volume of short stories, The Coming of the King (1897), and three years' residence in New York, only partially satisfactory to him in literary achievement, Malone returned to Memphis in 1900, publishing in that year his Songs of North and South.

In its seasonal poems and verse sketches full of affectionate observation of Southern scenes, richly described, this volume showed Malone at his best; but his poem "Opportunity, " which appeared in 1905, captured the public ear and got him popular fame at a level somewhat lower than his own ideal. In 1904 he published Poems, containing his work up to that date with revisions.

Appointed judge of the second division of the Shelby County Circuit Court in 1905, he held this position, universally respected and loved, until his death, and conducted his court according to the best traditions of the Tennessee bench. He experimented a little with play-writing and published Songs of East and West (1906), a volume of travel poems.

Then for some years, he gave his whole creative strength to his epic poem, Hernando De Soto, which, notwithstanding his ill health and his fears that it could not be finished, was published in 1914. Though illustrating the difficulty of following epic conventions in modern verse, the poem was one of the most ambitious ever written by an American.

The Mississippi River and the historic encounters of Spaniard and Indian had fired Malone's imagination. Despite much that was labored and artificial, his ardor infused magnificence of detail and narrative force into the long tale of De Soto's travels, conquests, and death.

In its monumental quality it symbolized the grave intensity of Malone's career, as a jurist and gentleman whose beloved avocation was poetry, and who felt that he owed it to himself and his subject to ignore contemporary trivialities, and that, in the perspective of posterity, only epic dignity could do justice to the history and scenes he loved.

He died of an apoplectic stroke in the Peabody Hotel, Memphis.

Achievements

• Walter Malone has been listed as a notable judge, author by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Narcissus, and other poems

    (This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)

  • Selected Poems

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Songs of East and West

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Songs Of North And South

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Songs of December & June

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • ***RE-PRINT*** Hernando De Soto

Connections

He was never married.

Father:

Franklin Jefferson Malone

9 August 1819 - 24 January 1873

Mother:

Mary Louisa Hardin Malone

12 March 1824 - 17 May 1901

Brother:

Ferdinand Madden Malone

26 February 1858 - 25 June 1943

Brother:

Robert Franklin Malone

29 January 1856 - 1926

Brother:

James H. Malone

31 October 1851 - 23 June 1929

Sister:

Ella Malone Watson

16 January 1860 - 23 August 1932

References

• Memphis Commercial Appeal: The History of a Southern Newspaper