J. H. McKenzie

J. H. McKenzie is a little-known poet remembered primarily for The Titanic Disaster Poem, a work published in 1912 soon after the sinking of the RMS Titanic. The text identifies the author with Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the poem was issued by Co-Operative Pub. Co., Guthrie, Okla.

Reliable public sources confirm only a small amount about McKenzie. Project Gutenberg lists just one work under the name, and the surviving editions point to a writer who turned a major news event into memorial verse almost immediately after it happened. That gives the poem a strong historical interest as well as a literary one.

Because so little biographical information is clearly documented in the sources available here, it is safest to see J. H. McKenzie as an obscure early-20th-century author whose reputation rests on a single surviving Titanic poem rather than on a well-recorded life story.