Writer James Hearst (1900-1983) spent his entire life in Iowa, but his descriptions of rural life in plain, accessible verses resonated beyond the state.
Jim O'Loughlin, an English professor and coordinator of the James Hearst Digital Archive at the University of Northern Iowa, said Hearst’s poems detailing farm tasks made a broader commentary about life.
“He never considered himself a regionalist poet in that he never thought he was writing just about Iowa or just about the farm,” O’Loughlin said. “Rather, he thought that by really considering the particulars of rural experience, he could still get the same insights into human experience and big existential questions.”
As a poet-farmer he was inspired by nature and humans’ relationship with the land.
His life as a writer was also influenced by an accident that left him unable to fully walk for most of his life. He mistakenly dove into a shallow river on Memorial Day in 1919, when he was 19 years old, and left him paraplegic.
“While he was able to contribute on the farm — there were stories of his brother, kind of carrying him onto a tractor in the morning, sending him off into the fields and coming back to get him at lunch — the fact that the kind of observational skills that he probably already had anyways, those were something that he could still do even while he was not as mobile as he was at one time,” O’Loughlin said. “And I think he developed them in the ways that made him a poet.”
Like Frost, he's someone that wrote a lot about the rural experience, and that's someone who also thought very deeply about meaning, how we create meaning, where we find things that are of value in life.Jim O'Loughlin
Though he hadn't earned a college degree himself, he joined the University of Northern Iowa faculty in 1941 as a creative writing professor and taught until 1975.
“He was a respected poet at the time and I think he kind of came on board as a bit of an experiment and then things went so well that he stayed on for over three decades,” O’Loughlin said.
He said that Hearst gained a reputation for his attention to detail when reviewing his students’ work. When he retired in 1975, he became the first person to receive an honorary degree from the University of Northern Iowa.
Hearst donated his home to the City of Cedar Falls with the intention that it be used as an arts center for the community. His home was reconstructed into the James and Meryl Hearst Center for the Arts.
Some called Hearst the Robert Frost of the Midwest – though Robert Frost, an admirer of Hearst, once said he was the James Hearst of New England.
“Like Frost, he's someone that wrote a lot about the rural experience, and that's someone who also thought very deeply about meaning, how we create meaning, where we find things that are of value in life,” O’Loughlin said.
Hearst’s observations on rural life are also notable because he was writing at a time during the technological evolution of farming.
“All of his writing throughout the years covers that kind of wide range of understandings of farming and of rural life, and it's hard to find someone who has again, that same kind of scope of experience and kind of breadth of knowledge in poetic form,” O'Loughlin said. “So he's a really distinctive and iconic Iowa figure for a good reason.”
