Digital Commons Network^™

John Mitchell: Journeyman-Poet, Edward D. Ives

Maine History

In this article folklorist Edward D. Ives traces the life and work of journeyman-poet John Mitchell, who moved from job to job in northern Maine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ives uses oral history and a few extant poems to give us a glimpse at the life of the common laborer on the raw northern Maine frontier. Mitchell was a wanderer, but he knew the world of the ordinary working man from the inside out, and his poems express the hopes, fears, humor and irony of daily life as he saw it. “Sandy” Ives is professor emeritus from …