Background on Josiah D. Canning
A native of the miniscule western Massachusetts town of Gill, Josiah Dean Canning enjoyed a brief popularity during the nineteenth century as a poet of rural life and the virtues of the land. The "Peasant Bard" was born in Gill on August 31, 1816, the third of five sons of a minister and Williams College graduate, Josiah Weeks Canning and his wife Almira. Raised in home that prized education, Josiah grew into a minor prodigy, marking out his future in literary endeavors at an early age. At fifteen he built a printing press and published his own newspaper off and on for three years, ending the last issue in April 1834 with an original poem, "The Village Post's Finale."
Anxious to see a wider world, Canning ventured to Detroit in July 1834 to join his brother as a printer on the staff of the Detroit Courier, but when the brother died of cholera, Josiah returned home again. Although he took work as a printer in nearby Greenfield, he remained footloose and subsequently took printing positions in Virginia and Wisconsin before settling in Gill once and for all in 1837.
Canning's return signaled a change in life in several regards, most notably his turn away from printing work to farming and the blossoming of his career as a poet. Canning began writing more seriously and publishing poetry that drew inspiration from nature and extolled the virtues of agrarian life. The first of his five books of poetry, the accurately-named Poems (Greenfield, 1838), garnered wide notice after the influential literary periodical, The Knickerbocker ran a laudatory review, calling Canning the "farmer's boy, from a sequestered vale of the Connecticut, who draws his figures from ever-glorious nature!" The author of the review, Louis Gaylord Clarke, referred to Canning as the Peasant Bard, a name which he gladly adopted.
Tinged by the romantic writers he admired and frequently nostalgic, Canning's subject matter was firmly planted in place, extolling the spiritual virtues of farming in general, or the familiar trope of the vanishing Indian, but with an eye toward local specificity. Later in life, Canning became a supporter of local historical and antiquarian endeavors, as an officer of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and was engaged in local politics in Gill.
