John Hay Biography | Poet

John Hay was born in Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated from Brown University in 1858, and was admitted to the Illinois Bar a few years later. At nineteen, when he returned to Warsaw, the little Mississippi town where he had lived as a boy, he dreamed only of being a poet, a poet of the pleasantly traditional type. But the Civil War was to disturb his mild fantasies. He became private secretary to Lincoln, then major and assistant adjutant-general under General Gilmore, then secretary of the Legation at Paris, chargé d’affaires at Vienna, and Secretary of Legation at Madrid.

His several Pike County Ballads were a mere accident. When Hay came back from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian Days, he still thought of himself as an orthodox lyric poet. But he found everybody reading Bret Harte’s short stories and the new expression of the rude West. He speculated on possibly doing something similar, translating the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads in a vein utterly different from everything Hay had written before. The poet-politician seems to have regarded them somewhat like light, extempore verse, belonging to a far lower plane of effort than his serious compositions; he talked about them reluctantly and even hoped they would be forgotten. It is hard to say whether this regret was due to Hay’s 11 loving the refinements of culture, at heart hating anything coarse, or to a basic cowardliness—Hay having published his extremely advanced novel of labor unrest in the early 80’s (The Breadwinners) anonymously.

The fact remains that his rhymes of Pike County have survived all his more classical lines. They served for a time as a fresh influence and remain a creative accomplishment.

Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has ever had. He died in 1905.