The Beecher Beached

MP3 Audio CD. Father John Banister Tabb was a US poet, Roman Catholic vicar, and an instructor of English. He was born into among Virginia's most archaic and richest families, he was a defense runner for the Confederacy throughout the Civil War, and was incarcerated in a Union prison camp for 8 months, where he founded a lifetime companionship with poet Sidney Lanier. He later changed his religion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1872, and started to educate Greek and English at Saint Charles College in Ellicott City, Maryland.

He became a vicar in 1884, after which he kept his educational profession. Afflicted by vision problems his entire life, he became fully blind around one year earlier his death in the rooms in college that he had remained to dwell in after he retired.

Father Tabb, as he was usually called was largely produced in famous and prominent periodicals during his time, such as Harper's Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Cosmopolitan. His collections of poetry are Poems, Lyrics, Later Lyrics, and, retrospectively, Later Poems. He also penned one fictional book, Bone Rules, an English grammar; only one of his homilies has subsisted, a sermon on the Assumption.

British poet Alice Meynell created A Selection from the Verses of John B. Tabb (1906). His biographer, Francis A. Litz, a past student of Father Tabb, issued previous uncompiled poems and past unprinted poems in Father Tabb: A Study of His Life and Works (1923); Francis also edited a selected edition, The Poetry of Father Tabb (1928). The Tabb Monument in Amelia County, Virginia is devoted to his commemoration.

Some of his works include: A Bachelor Hen; A Blackberry Bush; A Blind Man?s Epitaph; A Brief Pedigree; A Bunch Of Roses; A Carcanet; A Cattle Plague; A Cavalcade; A Change of Parts; A Christmas Chime; and so much more.