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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The Hobo's poet

 

A Sailor's Life

Oh, a sailor hasn't much to brag —

An oilskin suit and a dunnage bag.

But, howsoever humble he be,

By the Living God, he has the sea!

 

The long, white leagues and the foam of it,

And the heart to make a home of it,

On a ship that kicks up waves behind

Through the blazing days and tempests blind.

 

Oh, a sailor hasn't much to love —

But he has the huge, blue sky above

The everlasting waves around,

That wash with an eternal sound.

 

So bury me, when I come to die,

Where the full-sailed, heeling clippers ply;

Give up the last cold body of me,

To the only home that I have — the sea!

 

 Harry Hibbard Kemp dubbed himself the “The Hobo’s poet” leaving one to assume his works were roughhewn and simple. But they weren’t. Far from it. His poems were overly complicated and overly polished, and, if the truth be known, not very good at all.  Critics of his day said Kemp was mostly all talk and little talent. Still, during his very long career, Kemp was the favorite of the literary bohemian crowd.

Move ahead to 1910, when Upton Sinclair and his wife Meta, said to be a woman who dripped of sensuality,  built a house in the single-tax village of Arden, Delaware. A year later, Sinclair invited Kemp to camp on the couple's land. (A bedding fit for a “hobo’s poet) Sadly,  Meta swooned for Kemp and left her husband for the poet, all leading to a nasty divorce. (Prior to Kemp, Meta had  an affair with John Armistead Collier, a theology student from Memphis; they had a son together named Ben.)

But Meta, a noted neurotic, wasn’t the Hobo type. She was descended from one of the First Families of Virginia, and had high ambitions for herself and dropped Kemp as quickly as she had picked him up.

Sinclair blossomed with his next wife Mary Craig Kimbrough, another woman from the American elite who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis.

Kemp (and Meta) faded into oblivion. He became a regular denizen of Greenwich Village in New York City and Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he was associated with the Provincetown Players. (There is a street named for him, Harry Kemp Way, in Provincetown.) He died on Cape Cod in 1960.