McIntyre was born in Forres, Scotland and came to Canada in 1841 at the age of 14. He worked as a hired hand to begin with, performing pioneer chores that formed the basis of a number of his works. Later, he settled in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he dealt in furniture. There he married and had a daughter and son.
He later moved to Ingersoll, Ontario, then a town of 5,000 on the banks of the Thames in Oxford County, the heart of Canadian dairy country. He opened up a furniture factory on the river and a store selling furniture along with such items as pianos and coffins.
He was never wealthy, but was well-loved in the community from which he often received aid in hard times. This was partly due to his poesy and other oratorical skills; he was called upon to speak at every kind of social gathering in Ingersoll. The region seems to have inspired him, and it was in celebration of the proud history of Canada, the natural beauty and industry of the region, and especially (as noted above) its cheese, that the majority of his oeuvre was written.
He published two volumes of poetry:
He was forgotten after his death for a number of years, until his work was rediscovered and reprinted by William Arthur Deacon, literary editor of the Toronto Mail and Empire and its successor the Globe and Mail, in his book The Four Jameses (1927).
In recent years a volume of his work, Oh! Queen of Cheese: Selections from James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet (ed. Roy A Abramson; Toronto: Cherry Tree, 1979) has collected his poems together with a variety of cheese recipes and anecdotes. However, perhaps the greatest boost to his fame came from a number of his poems being anthologized in the collection Very Bad Poetry, edited by Ross and Kathryn Petras (Vintage, 1997). This included his masterpiece and possibly best-known poem, "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese," written about an actual cheese produced in Ingersoll in 1866 and sent to exhibitions in Toronto, New York, and Britain: