Ralph Cheever Dunning
Ralph Cheever Dunning was an American poet active in the vibrant expatriate community in Paris during the 1920s. He arrived in the city around 1905 and published his first collection of poems, *Hyllus*, in 1910. Dunning lived a reclusive life in a modest room, often preferring solitude over social interaction, which was highlighted by his rare appearances in bustling cafes. His poetry, characterized by themes of transience and the inevitability of death, drew inspiration from Victorian poets of his youth and was marked by traditional styles and rhyme schemes.
Though his work initially did not receive widespread acclaim, Ezra Pound became an early champion of Dunning, helping to bring his poetry to the attention of literary journals. Dunning's poem "Rococo" was notably featured in the inaugural volume of the Black Manikin Press in 1926. Despite some praise, he faced significant criticism for his old-fashioned style, with mixed reviews from contemporaries, including a particularly harsh critique from Ernest Walsh. Dunning's life was tragically cut short at the age of fifty-two due to tuberculosis, with speculation about his health suggesting that he neglected basic care, such as eating. Today, he is often regarded as a poet whose contributions are overshadowed by his contemporaries, with his name largely forgotten in literary discussions.
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Ralph Cheever Dunning
Writer
- Born: 1878
- Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
- Died: 1930
- Place of death: Paris, France
Biography
Ralph Cheever Dunning belongs to the group of American expatriates who flourished in Paris during the 1920’s. He arrived in Paris around 1905 and published Hyllus, his first volume of poems for the Bodley Head Press, with the London publisher John Lane in 1910. Dunning seems to have cared only about writing and revising a few poems. He lived in a small room on the Notre Dame des Champs, making rare appearances in noisy cafes where he would sit and drink a glass of hot milk with a book open before him. Writing for the Paris Times, Wambly Bald called the bleak room furnished only with a cot, stove, bookcase, and single chair, a “ wooden box.” Dunning attracted attention as a poet only after Ezra Pound began to take an interest in his work. Pound persuaded Dunning to release a manuscript containing the poem “The Four Winds” to Poetry and the Transatlantic Review, journals that published portions of Dunning’s manuscript in 1924 and 1925. The entire text was later printed in 1929 by the Black Manikin Press in Paris and was edited by Edward Titus. Dunning was later reported to have spoken only a few sentences during his entire twenty years in Paris and to have entered into conversations only with Ezra Pound, Sisley Huddleston, and Samuel Putnam.
Huddleston thought that Dunning had developed a dislike of eating but described him as one of the most likeable men of Huddleston’s acquaintance. Dunning’s poetry meditates on transience and focuses on the certainty of death. Influenced by the English poets writing during his youth, he preferred the styles, diction, and rhyme schemes of the Victorians. In 1926 he was awarded the Helen Haire Nevinson Prize offered by Poetry magazine. His poem “Rococo,” a twenty- two-page love story written in terza rima, was also selected by Edward Titus to appear in the Black Manikin Press’s maiden volume in 1926. Contemporary critics were appalled that this old- fashioned writing was receiving attention. Pound, on the other hand, described Dunning as one of the four or five “major poets of our time.” Dunning was ridiculed in the Paris Times and brutally reviewed by Ernest Walsh in The Quarter; Walsh said that Dunning had the “soul of Dowson and Swinburne and Keats and Shelley as well as their. . . florid importance of expression” and concluded that Pound had not actually read Dunning’s work. Pound’s classic response was that “anyone who cannot feel the beauty of [Dunning’s] melody had better confine his criticism to prose and leave the discussion of verse to those who know something about it.” Dunning died at fifty-two, worn out from tuberculosis. Poet Ernest Hemingway’s diagnosis of his untimely death was that he “forgot to eat.” In “Paris Was Our Mistress” (1947), Putnam summed Dunning up as “a poet of the old school whose name is wholly forgotten now.”