Ernest Walsh
Ernest Walsh was a poet and editor known for his brief yet impactful life, which spanned from 1985 in Detroit, Michigan, to 1926 in Monaco. Born into a family with a coffee and tea wholesale business, Walsh experienced early affluence in Cuba before facing hardships following his father's death. He left home at the age of fourteen and, after a bout with tuberculosis, developed a passion for poetry while recovering in a New York sanatorium. His journey took him to Texas for military training, where a near-fatal plane crash further complicated his health.
In Paris, Walsh gained recognition through the support of influential figures like Ezra Pound and Ethel Moorhead, who became his patron. He launched a literary magazine, This Quarter, aimed at promoting modernist writers and his own antiestablishment views. Unfortunately, Walsh's health deteriorated, limiting his editorial work, and he passed away in 1926 at Moorhead's villa in Monte Carlo. His legacy continued through the works of those he inspired, including his partner, poet Kay Boyle, who honored him in her writings after his death.
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Ernest Walsh
Writer
- Born: August 10, 1895
- Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
- Died: October 16, 1926
- Place of death: Monte Carlo, Monaco
Biography
Ernest Walsh had a brief but flamboyant life that began in Detroit, Michigan, in 1985 and ended thirty-one years later in Monaco. Born to a coffee and tea wholesaler, Walsh spent his early childhood amid affluent surroundings in Cuba. When he was an adolescent, his family returned to Detroit and fell on hard times after Walsh’s father died. Walsh left home at fourteen and took a series of odd jobs, contracting tuberculosis along the way. After confinement at a New York sanatorium, he developed an interest in poetry and took a writing course at Columbia University.
In 1917, while training in Texas as an aviation service cadet, he was in a plane crash that nearly killed him and further damaged his lungs. Walsh spent the next four years in military hospitals, recovering and writing. In 1921, he sent some of his work to Harriet Monroe, the influential editor of Poetry, who not only published some of his poems but also helped Walsh obtain a disabled veterans pension and wrote him letters of introduction to various important writers living in Paris, where Walsh intended to settle.
Once in Paris, Walsh was taken under the wing of poet Ezra Pound and Ethel Moorhead, a wealthy Scottish suffragist who would remain Walsh’s benefactor for the remainder of his life. Walsh and Moorhead spent a year traveling together through Europe in search of an hospitable climate. After returning to Paris in 1924, Moorhead funded a new, experimental literary magazine, This Quarter, to enable Walsh to disseminate his antiestablishmentarian ideas about literature and to publish his work. Dedicated to Pound, This Quarter published many important modernist writers, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Kay Boyle, the poet who would become Walsh’s lover and companion during his last year of life. Walsh was only able to edit two issues of his magazine before a medical board in 1925 prescribed complete bed rest. Walsh died in 1926 in Moorhead’s villa in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where he had been nursed by both Boyle and Moorhead.
After Walsh’s death, Moorhead created a literary scandal by unceremoniously jettisoning This Quarter’s homage to Pound and dedicating the third issue to Walsh. Boyle, who gave birth to Walsh’s daughter after his death, would memorialize him and their relationship in her novel, Year Before Last (1932), and again in her revised edition of Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930 (1968).