Ernest Walsh, expatriate American poet and coeditor of the small, but influential, experimental magazine This Quarter, was born in Detroit, Michigan. As a child he lived in Cuba, where his father, James Walsh, was a tea and coffee wholesaler. After the family returned to Detroit, his father died, and Walsh subsequently ran away from home at the age of fourteen. At seventeen he was diagnosed as tubercular and spent two years in a sanatorium at Lake Saranac, New York, from which he was discharged, supposedly cured. From 1914 to 1917 he wandered about the country in and out of work. Finally he enlisted in the army as an air cadet, and he was severely injured in the crash of the plane he was piloting during a training flight in Texas. The lung damage that he suffered as a result of the accident was complicated by the consumption from which he...