John Milton Harney, the first of the Kentucky poets to win and retain
a wide reputation, a man with the divine afflatus, whose whole body of
song is slender but of real worth, was born near Georgetown, Delaware,
March 9, 1789. He was the second son of Major Thomas Harney, of
Revolutionary War fame, and the elder brother of General William S.
Harney, a hero of Cerro Gordo. When John Milton Harney was but two
years old, his family emigrated to Tennessee, and later removed to
Louisiana. He studied medicine and settled at Bardstown, Kentucky. In
1814 Dr. Harney married a daughter of Judge John Rowan, the early
Kentucky statesman; and her death four years later was such a shock
to her husband that he was compelled to abandon his practice, and seek
solace in travel and new scenes. Dr. Harney spent some time in
England, and on his return to America he settled at Savannah, Georgia.
He over-exerted himself at a disastrous fire in Savannah, which
resulted in a violent fever and ended in breaking his health. He
returned to Bardstown, Kentucky, became a convert to Roman
Catholicism, and in that place he died, January 15, 1825, when but
thirty-five years of age. At the age of twenty-three years, Dr. Harney
wrote _Crystalina, a Fairy Tale_, in six cantos, but his extreme
sensitiveness caused him to hold it in manuscript for four years, or
until 1816, when it was issued anonymously at New York. This work was
highly praised by Rufus W. Griswold, John Neal, and other well-known
critics, but the unfavorable criticism far outweighed the favorable
criticism, so the author held, and he published nothing more in book
form; and he did all in his power to suppress the edition of
_Crystalina_. William Davis Gallagher, poet and critic of a later time
in the West, went over Dr. Harney's manuscripts and from them rescued
his masterpiece, the exquisite _Echo and the Lover_. This Gallagher
published in his _Western Literary Journal_ for 1837--the first form
in which the public saw it. No Western poem has had a wider audience
than the _Echo_. It has been parodied in Europe and America many
times, and is the finest expression of Dr. Harney's genius. It is to
be regretted that no comprehensive account of the poet's life and
literary labors has come down to posterity. As a poet and as a man his
merits were of the truest sort, but a handful of facts, a suppressed
book, a lyric or so, are all that have been brought to the attention
of the literary world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T.
Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by
Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892).