John Martin Finlay

John Finlay was born in his maternal grandmother's home in Ozark, Dale County, Alabama. One of five children, Finlay grew up on a peanut and dairy farm owned by his parents, Tom Coston Finlay and Jean Sorrell Finlay, outside the town of Enterprise, Alabama.[1] Tom Finlay's family were farmers with three- or four-hundred-acre tracts that made them "land rich" in local eyes. John Finlay's mother, Jean, belonged to the established gentry in Ozark: her grandfather was Ozark's town doctor; her grandmother was an elementary school teacher and school administrator; her father, Martin Sorrell, was a lawyer from a prominent Birmingham family who had clerked locally for Hugo Black; her uncle, Waldo Sorrell, served a term in the Alabama legislature during WWI; and her brother, Walker Sorrell, was a physician in Montgomery, Alabama.[2] According to Finlay biographer, Jeffrey Goodman:

"John Finlay never liked farming. Enterprise to him meant only the dull, hard life of farm chores, like milking cows or driving the tractor in the Alabama sun. Weekends in Ozark, however, meant his grandmother's library of classics and sweet hours in her leisurely and educated company. Annie Laurie Cullens, an old family fiend, observed Finlay's bright mind and precocious interest in his grandmother's library. Miss Cullens was a newspaper poet with connections to Mencken's wife and the cultural set in Montgomery. She gave John books, and he sat at the kitchen table while she and Uncle Waldo debated the merits of Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, atheism vs. theism, or argued over the latest novels reviewed in the Sunday Times. Back home in Enterprise, when Finlay drove the rusty tractor under the high, July sun, he might steady a copy of Shakespeare on the seat. On the pokey yellow school bus, he read. He named the cows he brought home from pasture after Greek gods and goddesses. By the age of fifteen, he was reading Wordworth's collected poems."[3]

John Finlay attended Enterprise High School where he was involved in theater and took a leading role in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. He was vice-president of his senior class, class orator, and voted "most scholarly."[3]

John Martin Finlay (right) and Professor Hudson Strode (far right), circa 1965

John Finlay moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1959 where he enrolled at the University of Alabama. Hudson Strode, an English professor at the university, became and influential part of Finlay academic and personal life. Strode and his wife frequently had Finlay over for dinner and included him on some of their travels in the South. During one such trip to Mississippi Strode introduced Finlay to John Crowe Ransom. In 1962, while still an undergrad, Finlay was named as one of four members of the university's G.E. Academic College Bowl team and was flown to New York for the competition.[4]

In 1964, after graduating with a BA in English with a minor in Creative Writing, Finlay started his M.A. program in English at the University of Alabama with a full graduate assistantship. While at Alabama he wrote poems for Comment, the campus literary magazine, and served as its editor-in-chief in 1965.[5] It was also while serving as the editor for Comment that Finlay interviewed Eudora Welty for the magazine's Winter issue.[6] Besides John Crowe Ransom and Eudora Welty, Finlay had the good fortune to meet other Southern writers while at the University of Alabama; this included meeting Allen Tate—who Finlay had invited to the university for a speaking engagement—and Andrew Lytle.[7]

Finlay finished his M.A. program in 1966, after which he began to teach at University of Montevallo (formerly Alabama College) in Montevallo as an instructor of freshman and sophomore English. He gave up his appointment in the spring of 1969. He had decided to pursue his doctorate work after reading an article, "Classicism and the Modern Poet,'' written by English professor—and former student of Yvor Winters—Donald E. Stanford. He wrote to Stanford in November of 1969 requesting to study under him.[8] In 1970, Finlay enrolled in the doctoral program under Donald Stanford at Louisiana State University.[9] Only a year into his program, Finlay dropped out to spend time living on the Greek island of Corfu where a friend's family was building a hotel. Finlay moved from Corfu to Paris in December of 1973. He only managed to spend several months in Paris before he ran out of money and required the aid of his uncle to purchase a ticket home.

Once back, Finlay got a job in Tuscaloosa at Bryce Hospital, Alabama's oldest and largest inpatient psychiatric facility (whose original name, when founded in 1861, was the Alabama State Hospital for the Insane). Finlay kept journal notes on his experiences while working at Bryce, and his poem “The Locked Wards” is based on his observations of mental patients in the hospital. Passages from Finlay's numerous journals were published posthumously in “With Constant Light”: The Collected Essays and Reviews, with Selections from the Diaries, Letters, and Other Prose of John Martin Finlay (1941–1991) by his friend David Middleton. An end-note in that volume includes a recollection of Bryce Hospital by Finlay's sister, JoAnn Finlay Hall:

"Bryce was the state mental institution located in Tuscaloosa.  Our grandmother’s husband, Warren Martin Sorrell, went there in his 30s and died there. It was always very hushed about as my grandmother never talked about him. They had four small children and she went home to live with her mother in Ozark [Alabama] in the house of the poem ‘The Wide Porch.’ I remember John looking his records up at the hospital. . . . Betty [Finlay Phillips] recalls John answering a suicide hot line while working at Bryce Hospital.”[10]

Finlay only held this job for several months before he reapplied to LSU's English doctorate program. He was readmitted and subsequently moved back to Baton Rouge. While continuing his coursework and teaching obligations Finlay began working on his dissertation topic, the intellectual theism of Yvor Winter, under the guidance of professor Stanford.[11] Finlay received his Ph.D. in English from LSU in 1980, the same year he converted to Roman Catholicism.[12] It was while a graduate student that Finlay became acquainted with other fellow poets—David Middleton (later his editor and literary executor), Lindon Stall, and Wyatt Prunty—who were also studying under professor Stanford.

It was during Finlay's later years that his writing began to generate serious critical acclaim, first in friends' letters, then in reviews. His strong publications in prestigious journals out of California, New York, England, and the South, established him as a serious writer among his contemporaries.

In 1981, Finlay returned to his family’s farm and remained there for the rest of his life.[12] Except for occasional teaching stints at Enterprise Junior College and helping out on the farm, Finlay's love for the life of the mind was largely unconstrained by occupational responsibilities. He continued to engaged in writing, poetry, and scholarship—within months of returning home he began studying Plato and taught himself Italian grammar in order to read Dante in its original language. Goodman estimates that Finlay produced between eighty and ninety percent of his important work, saying "in a critical and creative fury, he wrote a spate of profound essays and poems." While at home he typically wrote between ten and twelve hours at a time, staying up all night and sleeping during the day. Compared to his early poems, Finlay's later poems focused more on family life in the South since the early nineteenth century, Native American life in the South, the nature of modern war, and the isolation of the serious thinker and artist in the contemporary world.[13] Janet Lewis describes the poems from his later years as being wrought from

"metaphysical thought, meta-physical nightmare, Greek thought, Christian,. . . Pagan, images of the South, Southern families, a Southern boyhood, old people,. . . dying people,. . . the smell of salt, of fish, of rain, of pines and magnolias in the warm air, images of moonlight, and of waves falling on beaches of the Gulf or the Adriatic, Odysseus, Socrates, [and] Athena."[14]

Finlay saw his first chapbook of fifteen poems, The Wide Porch, published in 1984; Between the Gulfs, his second chapbook of seventeen poems, appeared in 1986; and his third chapbook of nineteen poems, The Salt of Exposure, followed in 1988. Besides these chapbooks, Finlay's "creative fury" was channeled into two essay collections. The first was a project tracing the Gnostic spirit present in the works of modern writers, using Yvor Winters, Flaubert, Valéry, Newman, Hopkins, Freud, Nietszche, and Kafka as examples. Following the line of argument in the essay “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller” by Allen Tate, Finlay argued in these essays that, like the world of the third-century Gnostics, the mind of the modern writer was a world from which the living God was absent—deus absconditus. The second was collection of essays on a spirit similar to, perhaps even identical with, the Gnostic spirit, a spirit he found in the works of certain ancient Greek philosophers. Finlay lived to complete two of these essays—“The Night of Alcibiades” and “The Socratics and the Flight from This World.” He left behind a partial draft of a third essay, untitled, on Plato’s Crito.[15] Finlay's intellectual and creative activity aside, his personal life during these later years was also shaped by sickness, death, and loneliness. Though Finlay had long suspected that himself to have had contracted HIV, it wasn't until 1982 that he was diagnosed with AIDS—a diagnosis that Finlay kept secret from his close friends until a couple years before his death.[16] He lost his father to lung cancer in 1983. In 1985, while attending a writer's conference at Nicholls State in Thibodoux, Louisiana, he had a falling out with his close literary friend, David Middleton (their friendship was silenced until 1989). Finlay did manage to spend a couple hours each day in corresponding with literary friends. In 1988, Bowers and English poet Dick Davis honored Finlay with an invitation to read his poetry at the University of Santa Barbara, California. On this occasion, he exhibited advanced stages of the HIV virus, appearing pale, dizzy, and nauseated. Finlay didn't admit his diagnosis to Bowers and Davis despite his appearance. By 1990, Finlay was blind and partially paralyzed, confined to a railed hospital bed in his room.[17] There he dictated to his final poem to his sister—“A Prayer to the Father,” twelve lines in six couplets addressed to God:

Death is not far from me. At times I crave

The peace I think that it will bring. Be brave,

I tell myself, for soon your pain will cease.

But terror still obtains when our long lease

On life ends at last. Body and soul,

Which fused together should make up one whole,

Suffer deprived as they are wrenched apart.

O God of love and power, hold still my heart

When death, that ancient awful fact appears;

Preserve my mind from all deranging fears,

And let me offer up my reason free

And where I thought, there see Thee perfectly.[18]

He died on February 17, 1991, leaving behind: three published chapbooks of poems as well as unpublished and uncollected poems, three essays from an unfinished book on the Greeks, an unpublished book of essays on the Gnostic spirit in modern literature—Flaubert in Egypt and Other Essays—and several journals he kept in Enterprise, on Corfu, in Paris, and in Baton Rouge. Roughly a quarter of Finlay's poetry appeared posthumously. His unpublished book of essays was combined with his other unpublished essays on the Greeks and published in 1994 under a different title, Hermetic Light: Essays on the Gnostic Spirit in Modern Literature and Thought. In view of Finlay's lifetime of poetry and essays, Jeffrey Goodman articulates Finlay's place among American writers and poets in the twentieth century best:

"As for Finlay's literary place: he was certainly not among the very highest rank of literary geniuses with Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, or Racine. Nor does he stand in the very first rank of American poets. His poetry was just peaking when he died. Yet Finlay's poetry contains here and there lines and passages at that high level. Because he wrote five or six major poems and twenty or more others close to this level, he ranks certainly among the first five or six poets of the American South, and likewise of the post-World War II generation. At the same time, he was one of the most brilliant literary essayists of the last decades of his century. He has indeed earned a place in American letters."[19]

• The Wide Porch and Other Poems. 18 poems. Florence, Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 1984.
• Between the Gulfs. 17 poems. Notes by Finlay on the poems “Origo mentis” and “Death in Asia Minor.” Florence, Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 1986.
• The Salt of Exposure. 19 poems. Omaha, Nebraska: Printed by Harry Duncan on The Cummington Press, 1988.

• A Garland for John Finlay. Edited by David Middleton. Poems by 20 American and British poets; comments on Finlay’s poetry by Janet Lewis and Donald E. Stanford; an essay on Finlay’s prose by Lewis P. Simpson; and “John Finlay: A Bibliography (1971–1991).” Thibodaux, Louisiana: Blue Heron Press, 1990.
• A Prayer to the Father: Poetry and Prose by John Finlay. Selected and edited from The John Finlay Papers by David Middleton. 25 poems. 9 excerpts from Finlay’s diaries. Thibodaux, Louisiana: Blue Heron Press, 1992.
• Mind and Blood: The Collected Poems of John Finlay. Edited and with a Preface by David Middleton. Santa Barbara, California: John Daniel and Company, 1992. This edition assembles the four earlier collections (with important late authorial emendations of several poems in the two Barth chapbooks) as well as 10 uncollected poems published in literary journals.
• Hermetic Light: Essays on the Gnostic Spirit in Modern Literature and Thought. Introduction and six essays. Foreword by Lewis P. Simpson. Edited and with an Afterword by David Middleton. Santa Barbara, California: John Daniel and Company, 1994. Main title chosen by the editor from a line of one of Finlay’s poems, “The Illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.” Finlay’s own title for this book, Flaubert in Egypt and Other Essays, could not be used for this edition.
• The American Tragedies: A Chronology of Six Poems. Edited and with an Afterword by David Middleton. Edgewood, Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 1997.
• In Light Apart: The Achievement of John Finlay. Edited by David Middleton. Essays and poems by Finlay and by various hands and with a descriptive bibliography of works by and about Finlay, including the preface “In Light Apart: The Achievement of John Finlay,” pages 7–10, by David Middleton. Glenside, PA: The Aldine Press, 1999.
• “With Constant Light”: The Collected Essays and Reviews, with Selections from the Diaries, Letters, and Other Prose of John Martin Finlay (1941–1991). Edited by David Middleton and John P. Doucet. Belmont, North Carolina: Wiseblood Books, 2020.
• “Dense Poems & Socratic Light”: The Poetry of John Martin Finlay (1941–1991). Edited by David Middleton and John P. Doucet. Belmont, North Carolina: Wiseblood Books, 2020.

• Notes for the Perfect Poem. Four-page, one-fold card. 14 prose statements. Excerpt from Finlay’s poem “Origo mentis” along with a brief historical comment on the background of the poem by David Middleton. Thibodaux, Louisiana: Blue Heron Press, 1994.
• The Deathless Word: Christian Meditations from the Diaries and Poetry of John Finlay. Four-page, one-fold card. 4 journal entries. Excerpt from Finlay’s poem “The Autobiography of a Benedictine.” Thibodaux, Louisiana: Blue Heron Press, 1994.

• “Elizabeth Daryush.” The Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Poets, 1914–45. Vol. 20. Edited by Donald E. Stanford. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983.109–12.
• “The Night of Alcibiades.” The Hudson Review. 47.1 (Spring 1994). 57–79.
• “The Socratics and the Flight from This World.” Hellas. 8.2 (Fall/Winter 1997). 63-80.
• A Statement on Poetics. Louisiana English Journal. 32 (new series). 1996. 14–15. Three photographs of John Finlay. 12, 17, 18. The Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation Proposal.

• “N. Scott Momaday’s Angle of Geese.”  Review of Angle of Geese by N. Scott Momaday. The Southern Review 11.3 (Summer 1975). 658–61.
• “Elizabeth Daryush.” Review of Collected Poems by Elizabeth Daryush. The Southern Review 14.2 (Spring 1978). 404–08.
• “Robert Bridges.” Review of In the Classic Mode: The Achievement of Robert Bridges by Donald E. Stanford. PN Review (Manchester, England) 6.6 (1979). 78-79.
• “Dick Davis’ Seeing the World.” Review of Seeing the World by Dick Davis. The Southern Review 17.3 (Summer 1981). 654–56.
• “Grosvenor Powell’s Language as Being.”  Review of Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters by Grosvenor Powell. The Southern Review 17.4 (Autumn 1981). 1001–03.
• “The Poetry of Raymond Oliver.” Review of Entries and To Be Plain by Raymond Oliver, The Southern Review 19.1 (Winter 1983). 178–80.
• “Three from the Symposium.” Review of Witnesses by Edgar Bowers, The Birthday of the Infanta by Janet Lewis, and Many Houses by Charles Gullans. The Southern Review 19.1 (Winter 1983). 181–83.

• “‘The Unfleshed Eye’: A Study of Intellectual Theism in the Poetry and Criticism of Yvor Winters.” Directed by Donald E. Stanford. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1980. Now available online.