Pens, Plows, and Gunpowder: The Collected Poems of J.P. Irvine

An average government clerk presented a poem to President Ulysses S. Grant and a crowd of 10,000 people, then J.P. Irvine and his words faded into history. This book gathers his poetry in one place for the first time ever, meticulously transcribed from sources that spanned from blurry, small-town newspaper microfilms to the archives of the era's most prestigious magazines. The texts reveal Irvine's full literary range: haunting Civil War poetry that rendered the conflict in urgent terms, street ballads that captured life in post-Civil War DC with humorous wordplay, and prairie hymns that translated the changing Midwestern horizons into verse.