Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

James Nack (1809–1879)

24  James Nack (1809–1879) Scarcely a decade passed between the founding of the first permanent American Deaf school and the publication in 1827 of the first book by a Deaf American. The Legend of the Rocks, and Other Poems contains sixty-eight poems composed before James Nack was eighteen years old. His long, lyrical poem “The Minstrel Boy” opens with doleful words about the state of the uneducated and unsaved Deaf, a sentiment that Nack’s future friend John R. Burnet replicated in the opening of his poem “Emma.” Later in the poem, Nack writes about what is really on his mind. He alternates between describing consolations—in beauty, art, nature, and poetry—and lamenting his fate, despairing of ever gaining “fame, fortune, independence,” and “the apple smile of love”—things that Deaf people did not quite yet think they deserved. Nack’s anxieties are soothed by looking forward to the Hereafter, where he imagines he will find the things that were beyond his grasp on Earth as a Deaf person. He moved beyond this fatalism in his later work. He is assertive in his short poem “The Music of Beauty,” in which he declares, “I pity those who think they pity me.” James Nack was born in New York City to a poor family. Homeschooled by his older sister, Nack could read by age four. When he was eight, he stumbled down a staircase and hit his head against a fire screen. He came out of his weeks-long coma to find himself deaf. In 1818, Nack enrolled at the newly opened New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. By the time he left school four years later, he had written many poems, including a complete tragedy. One of his poems so impressed Abraham Asten, a city clerk, that he helped Nack obtain a job in a lawyer’s office. The lawyer’s library enabled him to continue his education James Nack 25 and to teach himself foreign languages. Asten also put Nack in touch with writers who encouraged him to publish a collection of his verse. The Legend of the Rocks, and Other Poems received considerable praise, which was heightened by the critics’ amazement at his youth and deafness. They held up Nack as proof of the success and necessity of Deaf education. Nack married a hearing woman in 1838, and they had three daughters. He worked as a legal clerk for over three decades and published three more volumes of poetry, verse dramas, and short prose pieces. ...