Byron Herbert Reece: What Can We in the 21st Century Learn from ‘Georgia’s Farmer Poet’?
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
17-9-2018 5:00 PM
Description
Byron Herbert Reece was born in 1917 in a cabin on a small farm near Choestoe, in Union County, Georgia. From the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s he published four books of poems and two novels, all with E.P. Dutton in New York, and all receiving generally favorable reviews. Syndicated reviewer Edward M. Case in a 1955 review declared, “It seems to me that with the exception of Robert Frost, Reece is our greatest living poet, and even Frost is not so pure a lyricist, nor as strong and lonely a voice.” Reece is unquestionably the bard of the North Georgia Mountains, but his scope and his appeal are much wider. Though Reece was a product of and participant in his tiny community of Choestoe, his solitary nature as a writer, exacerbated by his tuberculosis, along with his wider experience of the world, afforded him a larger and more objective perspective on his community. His poems and novels together comprise a richly detailed narrative of an Appalachian farming community confronting the modern world as seen through the penetrating eyes of an intimate stranger.
Recommended Citation
Clark, James A., "Byron Herbert Reece: What Can We in the 21st Century Learn from ‘Georgia’s Farmer Poet’?" (2018). Humanities Symposium. 13.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2018/2018/13
Byron Herbert Reece: What Can We in the 21st Century Learn from ‘Georgia’s Farmer Poet’?
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Byron Herbert Reece was born in 1917 in a cabin on a small farm near Choestoe, in Union County, Georgia. From the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s he published four books of poems and two novels, all with E.P. Dutton in New York, and all receiving generally favorable reviews. Syndicated reviewer Edward M. Case in a 1955 review declared, “It seems to me that with the exception of Robert Frost, Reece is our greatest living poet, and even Frost is not so pure a lyricist, nor as strong and lonely a voice.” Reece is unquestionably the bard of the North Georgia Mountains, but his scope and his appeal are much wider. Though Reece was a product of and participant in his tiny community of Choestoe, his solitary nature as a writer, exacerbated by his tuberculosis, along with his wider experience of the world, afforded him a larger and more objective perspective on his community. His poems and novels together comprise a richly detailed narrative of an Appalachian farming community confronting the modern world as seen through the penetrating eyes of an intimate stranger.
Comments
Featured Speaker
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences