Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of Father Ryan (review)

Donald Robert Beagle and Bryan Albin Giemza here provide the fullest account to date of the life and times of Father Abram Ryan, the poet of Southern loss and ruin—themes, they note, that had been similarly enacted earlier in the Ireland from which his parents had emigrated. In that alone, their work is original and worthy of attention. Ryan is not an easy person to write about. Much of his poetry is excessively sentimental; he himself once referred to its "dreamy drapery." His opinions on the late Confederacy and on racial matters offend modern ways of thinking, and for that matter, offended many in his own time. His Irish views more resemble those of an intransigent John Mitchel (also a celebrant of the Confederacy and comfortable with chattel slavery) than a parliamentary figure like Parnell. "Compromise is the grave of truth" was an ever-present refrain with this bellicose poet. Beagle and Giemza try valiantly to redeem Ryan's poetry—more properly, verse—through laborious explications and commentary on the complexity of its metrical structure or its likely influence on Allen Tate, and they footnote his erratic and often undisciplined behavior through frequent reminders of his enormous popularity and selfless generosity. The note of ambivalence toward their subject, however, is never quite drowned out.

The trajectory of Ryan's relatively short career—he was only forty-eight when he died—runs from his birth in Virginia in 1838, to seminary attendance in Missouri in the Vincentian order, to further ecclesiastical education in upstate New York, to various appointments in Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, ending in a final period of peregrinations in the less sympathetic—though often enthused—Northeast and Midwest. Ryan appears to have been an ardent priest, but one in frequent conflict with ecclesiastical authorities, who nevertheless allowed him his head because he was an excellent fundraiser and the editor of widely disseminated newspapers that indirectly aided the Catholic cause in a Protestant South. He knew many of the key figures in the Confederate government, including Jefferson Davis, and received the reviled General Longstreet into the Catholic faith.

The authors convincingly explain how Ryan ministered to Confederate soldiers during the war without being officially listed as a military chaplain. They also explain how an accusation of sexual impropriety during a visit to Chicago was unlikely to have had any basis in fact, though a couple of separate comments on possibly earlier indulgences are alluded to without as much elaboration as one would wish. Though Ryan will be remembered best for his two Confederate poems—"The Conquered Banner" and "The Sword of Robert Lee"—they argue that his religious writing was better, especially "The Seen and the Unseen," a poem not unworthy of Emerson. There is also a fascinating commentary on how Ryan, ever a champion of American freedoms, sought to reconcile the recently announced doctrine of papal infallibility with American independence. Beagle and Giemza give plausible explanations of how such a visible and successful preacher and lecturer—his comments often found their way to the pages of the New York Times—died in poverty, noting his own generosity, financial mismanagement, and the possible dishonesty of his publishers and lawyer. Whatever judgment one may pass of Ryan's artistic abilities, it is no small matter for a poet's collected verse to go into more than forty editions.

Beagle and Giemza offer some harsh judgments on their subject: they concede that Ryan was "deeply flawed," that his life might readily be seen as unsuccessful, and that he "championed a lost cause and doomed himself to ignominy." His relations with his family were minimal, and his "willfulness alienated him from his clerical peers and spiritual home." Yet, however embarrassing—as late as the 1870s, Ryan was still referring to President Lincoln as "the bloody buffoon"—Fr. Ryan remains a figure of importance in the history of Irish America (and one regrets not having heard...