THE POETRY OF THE SOUTH
The non-mention of any Southern writers for nearly two centuries in
a history of American literature is likely to mislead the unthinking
reader. Certain qualifying facts should be reckoned with in drawing
any deductions. The first and most specific is that Poe, although born
in Boston and largely active in Philadelphia and New York, belongs
to the South. His poems and tales are without time and space, but
his criticisms are often vigorously sectional; yet he was really
an isolated character, speaking for himself without associates or
disciples.
For the comparative withdrawal of the South during a long period from
the writing and publishing of poems, essays, and stories, there are
two main reasons. One is the general nature of the early settlement
(see pp. 3, 4, 6). The spread of the population over a wide area and
the consequent lack of large towns gave no encouragement to printers
and publishers before the Revolution and furnished no such gathering
places as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Literature, like all the
other arts, thrives best in fellowship. With the Revolution and after
it the richest culture of the South devoted itself to statesmanship
and expressed itself in oratory. John Adams, governmental specialist,
regretted that he had no leisure for the arts (see p. 69), but Thomas
Jefferson, his successor in the White House, was a creative educator, a
linguist, an architect, and not unversed in music. Southern gentlemen
from the days of Jefferson and Madison to those of Abraham Lincoln read
"Mr. Addison" and "Mr. Steele" and "Mr. Pope," fashioned their speech
and writing after those courtly models, and, when they wrote at all,
circulated their efforts among friends, not submitting them to the
sordid touch of the publisher.
Moreover, the literary consciousness of the South is shown in the
history of the American theater. The earliest performances of which
there is record were given on Southern estates in the second quarter
of the eighteenth century. The Hallam company of players, arriving
from England in 1752, secured their first hearing in Maryland and
Virginia. Smaller Southern communities held their own with New York and
Philadelphia in the patronage of the stage, while surviving Puritan
prejudice made New England an arid field for the drama until well into
the next century. Again, the founding of the University of Virginia,
preëminent though not the oldest among Southern colleges, was a doubly
important event in American education, for it was first among state
universities, with a curriculum recognizing the demands of citizenship,
and it was unique in the beauty of its housing. Finally, journalism was
not neglected in the South, keeping pace with the progress in the rest
of the country; and the _Southern Literary Messenger_ (1834-1865) held
an enviable place among American periodicals during its thirty years of
life.
From 1850 the natural course of events in the South began to develop
literary centers, of which Charleston, South Carolina, was the most
notable. At this date William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) was in the
high prime of life and was the unchallenged leader by virtue of age,
literary achievement, and force of personality. He had appeared before
the public with two volumes of poems in 1827, without foregoing poetry
had gone on to prolific writing of adventure stories, and had produced
at the rate of more than a book a year. He was an aboundingly vigorous,
somewhat turbulent man, with a stimulating gift for talk and a very
generous interest in all men of literary feeling and especially in
younger aspirants. Around him and John Russell, the bookseller, there
gathered by social gravitation a group who became for Charleston
what the frequenters of the Old Corner Book Store were to Boston and
rather more than what the "Bohemians" of Pfaff's restaurant were to
New York. Russell's became a rendezvous for the best people during the
daytimes--perhaps to buy, perhaps only to talk--and in the evenings
the men gathered in the spirit of a literary club, though without
organization or name. _Russell's Magazine_ was the natural fruit of the
group-spirit thus engendered, just as the _Atlantic Monthly_ (see p.
288) was of similar associations in Boston or as the _Dial_ had been of
the Transcendental Club in 1840 (see p. 195).
It was a further consequence of this plowing of the cultural soil that
two Charleston boys born in 1829 and 1830 were encouraged as young
men not only to write but to publish their poems and that one became
the first editor and the other a frequent contributor to the local
periodical. These were Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Of the two
friends, somewhat as in the case of Halleck and Drake, Timrod, the one
who showed promise of finer things, was the victim of an early death.
As a youth he was given to the introspective seriousness and the grave
extravagances of the growing poet--characteristics which are not wholly
sacrificed in the grown poet, as they are in the average "sensible"
man. His inclination to extol emotion as an end in itself, however,
was fostered by a native hospitality toward sentimentalism for which
there was little to correspond in the more prosaic North. In fact "the
susceptibility of early feeling" which Irving wished to keep alive (see
p. 126) and which was the central thread in Jane Austen's "Sense and
Sensibility" was, and still is, a cue to certain prevailing Southern
traits. Whatever may have been the origin of Southern speech and
manners, they have continued in some measure to resemble those which we
associate with English literature of the mid-eighteenth century. Both
have a touch of courtly formality, a tendency toward the oratorical
style, an explicit insistence on honor and chivalry, a display of
deference to womanhood and to all beauty, and both are in constant
danger from the insincerity which besets a speech or a literature which
relies on conventional phrasing until the original locutions lose their
original vitality.[32]
[32] A corresponding danger on the other hand is that a people who
abjure all such phrases will abjure also the things for which
they stand, until they become irredeemably prosaic and matter of
fact.
Timrod as a youthful versifier passed through his period of
unconvincing extravagance, and even in his earlier work showed by
occasional flashes that he had his own gift for expression as well
as a receptive mind for poetry. In 1859 his first book of poems was
published. It had the coveted distinction of the Ticknor and Fields,
Boston, imprint, but it was indubitably the utterance of a Charleston
poet. The sonnet "I know not why, but all this weary day" is full of
genuine feeling, and in its ominous despair foretells the coming war:
Now it has been a vessel losing way,
Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray
Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main;
And then, a banner, drooping in the rain,
And meadows beaten into bloody clay.
Timrod's two greater poems were dedicated to the Confederacy. They are
the outpourings of loyalty to the shortlived nation, full of passion,
no freer from hate and recrimination than the average poems from the
North, but positive in their ardent faith in the beneficent part the
Confederacy was to play in future history. Like all other war poets
he suffered from the embittering effects of the conflict. His first
inclination was to think more about his hopes for the South than
about his hatred of the North; yet even in "The Cotton Boll" and in
"Ethnogenesis" he saw red at times, as any human partisan was bound to
do. The newly federated South was to send out from its whitened fields
an idealized cotton crop that "only bounds its blessings by mankind."
The labors of the planter were to strengthen the sinews of the world.
Yet into this finely altruistic mood came the acrid thought of the war
which was in progress, and in a moment he was vilifying the "Goth" in
the same breath that he was resolving to be merciful. Timrod endured
without flinching as an individual. As a confederate patriot he dreamed
Not only for the glories which the years
Shall bring us; not for lands from sea to sea,
And wealth, and power, and peace, though these shall be;
But for the distant peoples we shall bless,
And the hushed murmurs of a world's distress.
But when the war was over, in his "Address to the Old Year" (1866) he
was all for complete and speedy reconciliation.
A time of peaceful prayer,
Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain--
These are the visions of the coming reign
Now floating to them on this wintry air.
Fortunately, in the slow approach toward this millennial conclusion
Timrod was spared the brutal blunders of the Reconstruction period, for
he died within the next twelvemonth, serene in his hopes.
* * * * *
Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-1886), a man of moderate talents and of
achievement that was greater in bulk than quality, was whole-heartedly
devoted to literature. With the founding of _Russell's_, while the
bookseller supplied the capital and Simms the general stimulus, Hayne
was the obviously willing and capable young man to carry the editorial
routine. If the war had not cut short the life of the magazine within
three years, Hayne might have fulfilled a long and useful career in
its guidance. Moreover, the kind of criticism to which his work would
have accustomed him might have refined his own verse and reduced its
quantity as it did for Aldrich and Gilder. But a career like theirs was
denied him when _Russell's_ was discontinued, and he was forced into
the precarious existence of living by his pen without the assurance
of any regular salary. Though this may be a sordid detail, it is not
a negligible one, for the lack of a certain income not only disturbs
the artist's mind but goads him to writing for monetary rather than
artistic ends. This result is apparent in Hayne's work. He had to force
himself, and he wrote in consequence the only kind of poetry that
industry and good will can produce.
Much of it was for special occasions. He wrote on demand for
everything, from art exhibits to cotton expositions, always
conscientiously without any special lightness or felicity. He fell
into the conventional nineteenth-century habit of writing on romantic
subjects located in parts of the earth which he knew only from other
men's poetry. His best work, of course, sprang more directly from his
experience. Some of his war lyrics are stirring, though seldom up to
Timrod's best. Some of his protests after the war are spirited and
wholly justified by the stupid clumsiness of Northern control. "South
Carolina to the States of the North" and "The Stricken South to the
North" suggest in verse what Page's "Red Rock" and Tourgée's "A Fool's
Errand" present through the detail of extended novels. Hayne's tributes
to other poets, particularly to Longfellow and Whittier, are full of
generous admiration, and his nature poems ring finely true. Most of all
the Southern pine fascinated him by its perennial grace and strength
and its mysterious voice. A pine-tree anthology could be culled from
his verse.
To be the poet of a class or a district and no more than that
is ordinarily not a notable achievement, but the fact that they
represented an epoch as well as a section emphasizes the significance
of Timrod and Hayne. They were products of freshly stimulating
conditions in the South; before the war they began to sing for a
neighborhood that had long been comparatively silent. And when the
war came on, and after its conclusion, they were not only its best
singers but they were remarkable in war literature for the fineness of
their positive spirit and their relative freedom from abusive rancor.
They reaped in love and praise the reward that their impoverished
constituency could not pay them in money.
* * * * *
Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842. He was therefore
twelve or thirteen years younger than Hayne or Timrod, and his
productive period was correspondingly later, namely, in the 70's. He
could trace his Lanier ancestry back to the court musicians of the
Stuarts, and beyond them to a conjectured past in France. His mother
sang and played in the home, and his father, a courtly and refined
lawyer, was a "gentle reader" of the old Southern school. Macon was
a town of extreme orthodoxy where "the only burning issues were
sprinkling versus immersion, freewill versus predestination," but where
the rigors of Calvinism were mollified by innocent merrymaking and the
amenities of Southern hospitality. From here Lanier went, in 1857, to
Oglethorpe University as a member of the sophomore class, graduating
from the modest college with first honors in 1860. Though successful
in scholarship, he had found his chief enjoyments in wide reading of
romantic literature and in flute-playing. He was convinced that his
talents were in music, but his strong ethical bias led him to check
them because he could not satisfactorily answer the question, What is
the province of music in the economy of the world? On his appointment
as tutor at Oglethorpe he decided to remain in college-teaching,
rounding out his preparation by two years at Heidelberg. When the war
broke he seemed to be well started on the path trod by Longfellow and
Lowell.
In "Tiger Lilies," his early romance, he described how the "afflatus
of war" swept the South as it sweeps any land in the first hours of
decision. "Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs
and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance
in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts,
conditioning impatient lovers with war services. It thundered
splendidly in the impassioned words of orators to the people. It
whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked
glasses in barrooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in
conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it
rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms.... It offered tests
to all allegiances and loyalties,--of church, of state; of private
loves, of public devotion; of personal consanguinity, of social ties."
In 1861 Lanier enlisted in the first Georgia regiment to leave for the
front. Four years later he returned with health permanently impaired by
the hardships of service and of a prison camp.
Even though wrecked in health, he came out from the war saddened but
not embittered, and convinced as early as 1867 that the saving of the
Union had been worth the ordeal. His insistence that hatreds should
be buried was maintained in face of every influence to the contrary.
The countryside had been devastated and business brought to a stop.
Libraries had been destroyed and colleges closed. As recuperation
began the magnanimous influence of Lincoln waned, and the reign of
the "carpetbaggers" inflamed the worst elements in the South, drove
some of the better in despair to other parts of the country, and
reduced the rest to bruised and heartsick indignation. Lanier could
not be unaffected by such conditions. He took refuge in grinding work:
first in teaching and then in several years of law practice in the
examination of title deeds. "Tiger Lilies" was published in 1867 by
Hurd and Houghton in New York, and a number of poems were printed there
in the _Round Table_ during 1867 and 1868. But depression and drudgery
tended to silence him, and might have done so if the music in him had
succumbed with the poetry and if the poetry had not been revived by
the stimulating friendships of two older men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and
Bayard Taylor.
Music gained a new hold on him during an enforced health trip to Texas
in the winter of 1872-1873. He had reveled in the concerts he had heard
in different visits to New York after the war, but in San Antonio he
fell in with a group of musicians for whom he was a player as well
as an auditor. Without any formal instruction in the flute he had
achieved such a command of the instrument that it had become a second
voice for him. In the autumn of '73 he met and played for Hamerick,
Director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and in
December he went in triumph to his initial rehearsal as first flutist
in the newly organized Peabody Symphony Orchestra. For the rest of
his life music was his most reliable means of support and a source of
pleasure that amounted to little less than dissipation. As a performer
he was in great demand for extra local engagements, from which he
seemed to gain quite as much enjoyment as he gave--for he played in a
kind of ecstasy; he "felt in his performance the superiority of the
_momentary inspiration_, to all the rules and shifts of mere technical
scholarship." As an auditor, whether of his own music or that rendered
by others, his appreciation was almost wholly sensuous, an experience
of raptures, thrills, and swooning joys. "Divine lamentations, far-off
blowings of great winds, flutterings of tree and flower leaves and
airs troubled with wing-beats of birds or spirits; floatings hither
and thither of strange incenses and odors and essences; warm floods of
sunlight, cool gleams of moonlight, faint enchantments of twilight;
delirious dances, noble marches, processional chants, hymns of joy and
grief: Ah, midst all these I lived last night, in the first chair next
to Theodore Thomas' orchestra." From such a comment one is prepared for
frequent references to the more modern composers, few to Beethoven, and
none at all to Bach and Brahms; and one is helped to understand also
the mistakenly limited dictum--too often quoted--that "Music is love in
search of a word." Music was immensely important in Lanier's emotional
life; the kind that he most enjoyed, and the kind of enjoyment he
derived from it, furnished the cue for an interpretation of much of his
poetry--a cue which is the clearer when compared with what music meant
to Browning.
The development of a Baltimore orchestra in 1873 was an expression
of the reawakening of artistic life from Baltimore to the Gulf. By
1870 the call was repeatedly sounded for a new literature and a new
criticism in the South. Short-lived magazines sprang up and were
flooded with copy before their early deaths. Much was written that
was ostentatiously sectional in tone, but much by men like Hayne and
Cable and Page that approached the standard set by Joel Chandler
Harris in his appeal for a literature which should be "intensely local
in feeling, but utterly unprejudiced and unpartisan as to opinions,
traditions, and sentiment. Whenever we have a genuine Southern
literature, it will be American and cosmopolitan as well." Equally in
the interest of the South was Hayne's demand for criticism which should
put a quietus on the fatuous scribblers who had nothing to say and said
it badly. "No foreign ridicule," he wrote in the _Southern Magazine_ in
1874, "can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers
have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such
manifestations of artistic weakness and artistic platitudes as have
hitherto been foisted on us by persons uncalled and unchosen of any of
the muses."
At the same time a generously enterprising spirit led several of the
leading Northern editors to accept and even solicit contributions from
the South. In 1873 _Scribner's Monthly_ projected and secured a widely
advertised series of articles on "the great South." _Harper's_ had a
series of its own. The _Atlantic_, with Howells as editor, followed
conservatively, and the _Independent_ opened its columns to the poetry
of the men whom it had condemned in most aggressive terms a dozen years
earlier. More important to Lanier than any of these was _Lippincott's_,
in which "Corn," "The Symphony," and "The Psalm of the West," with
certain shorter poems, were published in 1875, 1876, and 1877--poems by
which his wide reputation was established.
The encouragement given him by Hayne in the dark days of the law, when
he had no time to write, was followed by a Northern friendship of even
greater value to him when the _Lippincott_ poems were brought to the
kindly attention of Bayard Taylor. This busy and large-hearted man of
letters seems to have been the literary friend of his whole generation.
He was on terms of easy acquaintance with the most renowned of his day.
He was a companion of publishers, editors, and journalists, and he
showed a most generous interest in the fortunes of promising younger
men. His literary status is summarized in his relation to the literary
ceremonies of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. He
wrote the Ode for the Fourth of July celebration after the honor had
been declined by Bryant, Lowell, and Longfellow, and he had sufficient
influence to gain for Lanier the distinction of writing the Cantata
for the opening ceremonies. The exchange of letters between the two in
connection with their efforts is unsurpassed as a record of detailed
processes in poetic composition, criticism and rejoinder, and final
revision.
Lanier's conscious command of a poetic theory was a product of his
habits of study and led to his appointment by President Daniel
Coit Gilman as lecturer in English literature at Johns Hopkins
University.[33] From youth Lanier had been an extensive reader of the
early English classics, and in Baltimore he eagerly used the resources
of the Peabody Library, which was maintained especially for research
students. He was keenly interested in stimulating general intelligence
in literature among the adult public and also in promoting exact and
technical study by qualified scholars. In 1878 he plunged once more
into study, planned lecture courses, projected a research program for
himself, and early in the next year received the Hopkins appointment.
He approached his work with the utmost zest and, as long as his
strength lasted, lectured effectively and worked on the critical texts
and treatises which the scholarship of his time was just beginning to
supply. Now, however, when he had established working relations with
the orchestra and the university, he sank under the strain of all the
preceding struggle, and in 1881 he died before reaching his fortieth
year.
[33] This was the second time that President Gilman had placed a poet
in the position of teacher, for he had already done this with
Edward Rowland Sill at the University of California (see p. 397).
Lanier's abiding conviction put the poet on the same plane with the
prophet and the seer. He was far from according with Poe's total
subordination of intellect and moral sense to the feeling for beauty.
He seldom or never wrote a didactic poem, but he usually composed over
a strong moralistic counterpoint. In "Corn" the poet
leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme.
In "The Bee" he will wage wars for the world. In "The Marshes of Glynn"
he is
the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain.
The poet's judgments are, therefore, certain to surpass those of his
age, certain to reap a harvest of derision and abuse, and certain to
approach the right because they are made in the light of eternity
rather than in the ephemeral shadow of any passing day.
The tolling of the bell of time which resounds throughout Lanier's
poems does not deafen him to the harmonies or the discords of the
moment. With all his consciousness of literary tradition he was far
more alive to the present than many of his Southern contemporaries, who
were not so genuinely literary as imitatively bookish. "Corn" tells
the tale of the improvident cotton-grower who becomes "A gamester's
catspaw and a banker's slave." "The Symphony" is an arraignment of the
industrial system.
If business is battle, name it so:
War-crimes less will shame it so,
And widows less will blame it so.
"Acknowledgment" (first sonnet) and "Remonstrance" were written of the
troublous period which was wracked between doubts that merely disturbed
and dogmas which were still advocated with all the subtleties of
persecution that--in an enlightened age--will substitute ostracism for
the stake and social boycott for excommunication.
In the modest volume of his collected work--for his writing was mainly
done in his last eight years, and he was not a garrulous poet--there
is a marked variety. "The Revenge of Hamish" is a clear reflection
of his zest for heroic story. It is one of the notably successful
attempts of his day to emulate the old ballad, and it is the better
for restoring the spirit of balladry without imitating the manner.
"How Love Looked for Hell," without being imitative of anyone, is
distinctly pre-Raphaelite in tone. Rossetti might have written it.
In "The Stirrup-Cup" there is an Elizabethan note, and "Night and
Day" and the "Marsh Song--at Sunset" are literary lyrics for the
readers of "Othello" and "The Tempest." These and their like give
token of Lanier's versatility, just as the "Song of the Chattahoochee"
displays his command of certain obvious devices in diction and rhythm;
but the poems most distinctive of Lanier and most generally quoted
are the longer meditations already mentioned, and, in particular,
"The Symphony" and "The Marshes of Glynn." Of these the earlier is
much quoted by social reformers for the vigor of its protests at
the exploitation of labor; by musicians, because of the sustained
metaphor--though it might better have been named "The Orchestra"; and
by those who love a certain fulsomeness of sensuous appeal in verse.
This last trait gains friends also for "The Marshes of Glynn," though
its supreme passage, the last forty lines, is free from the decorative
elaborations which in the earlier portion distract the reader from the
content they adorn.
In the development of artistic power the formative period is the most
open to influence and the most likely to be formal and self-conscious.
Early and full maturity bring the nicest balance between the thing
said and the manner of saying it; and a later period often is marked
by overcompression or over-elaboration, a neglect of form in favor of
content. Lanier, who died on the approach to middle life, had just
published "The Science of English Verse" and was studiously aware
of poetic processes, from the ingenious conceits of the "Paradise
of Dainty Devices" to the metrical experiments of Swinburne and his
contemporaries. In the compound of factors which were blending into the
matured Lanier there was still a good measure of Elizabethan ingenuity.
He felt a pleasant thrill in riding a metaphor down the page. He played
repeatedly, for example, with the concept of the passage of time. In
the second sonnet of "Acknowledgment" this age is a comma, and all
time a complex sentence (four lines); in "Clover" the course-of-things
is a browsing ox (twenty-five lines); in "The Symphony" the leaves
are dials on which time tells his hours (three lines); in the first
of the "Sonnets on Columbus" prickly seconds and dull-blade minutes
mark three hours of suspense (three lines); and in "The Stirrup-Cup"
death is a cordial compounded by time from the reapings of poets long
dead (twelve lines). These all are picturesquely suggestive, but they
are rather imposed on the idea than derived from it. Other poets,
to be sure, have erred in the same way and then perhaps redeemed
themselves. Lanier, however, said nothing so fundamentally true and
compact as Pope's "Years following years _steal something_ every
day," or Shakespeare's "And that _old common arbitrator_, Time," or
his "_whirligig_ of time." There is a similar reaching for effect in
the rhythmical quality of many well-known passages. The twelve-line
description of the velvet flute-note in "The Symphony" is more deft
and intricate than convincing. The figures stumble on each other's
heels, and the alliterations, assonances, and three- and five-fold
rimes are intrusively gratuitous. In like manner the opening lines of
"The Marshes of Glynn" illustrate the over-luxuriance of Lanier. He
delighted in tropical exuberance; he rioted in his letters with less
restraint than in his verse, and in one written to his wife in 1874
he confessed parenthetically: "In plain terms--sweet Heaven, how I do
abhor these same plain terms--I have been playing 'Stradella.'" When he
wrote this Lanier was thirty-two. Before his death he had approached
the point of liking the plain term better and employing it oftener.
"The Marshes of Glynn" is a personal utterance of Lanier in its
form, in its sensuous opulence, in its social sympathies, and in its
religion; but in these latter respects it is emphatically the utterance
also of the period that produced Lanier. It was written in 1878, the
year of Bryant's death; it was written in the structural sequence
of Bryant's "Thanatopsis"; and in its applications it indicates the
changes that had taken place in religious thought since Bryant's
youth. In the earlier poem the various language that Nature speaks is
expounded in general terms, before "Thoughts of the last bitter hour"
lead to the monody on death and the resolve so to live that death shall
have no fears. The latter poem differentiates the tones of Nature,
lingering first in the cloistral depths of the woods during the heat of
a June day. In the cool and quiet the poet's
... heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
And belief overmasters doubt.
So, toward sunset, he leaves the protected green colonnades and goes
out unafraid to face the expanse of "a world of marsh that borders a
world of sea." Here Nature, who has consoled him in the forest, fills
him with a great exhilaration.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.
From the marshes he learns a lesson of life rather than of death--the
spiritual value of aspiration and the emancipating gift of a broad
faith. "Thanatopsis" ends with a nobly stated but restraining
admonition; "The Marshes" with a song of liberty:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the
skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold of the greatness of God.
This is written in the positive mood--and in the measure, too--of
Browning's "Saul." Both poems record the throwing off of paralyzing
restraint and the substitution of hope for dread that resulted from the
religious struggles of the nineteenth century.
Lanier went far toward representing the South by the best of all
methods, which is to write as a citizen of the world and not as a
sectionalist. He was not at the height of his maturity, and he wrote
at times with the exuberance and at times with the self-consciousness
that he would in all likelihood have outgrown in the fullness of years.
He was an aggressive thinker. Only the indifference of his generation
to poetry can account for the fact that he was not persecuted for the
courage of many utterances. And he was essentially the poet in artistry
as well as in vision.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
=Collections=
CLARKE, JENNIE T. Songs of the South (Introduction by J. C.
Harris). 1913.
FULTON, N. G. Southern Life in Southern Literature. 1917.
KENT, C. W. (literary editor). Library of Southern Literature.
1907. 15 vols.
MANLY, LOUISE. Southern Literature. 1895.
MOORE, FRANK. Songs and Ballads of the Southern People. 1886.
TRENT, W. P. Southern Writers. Selections in Prose and Verse.
1905.
WAUCHOPE, G. A. Writers of South Carolina, 1910.
=History and Criticism=
BASKERVILL, W. M. Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical
Studies. 1898-1903. 2 vols.
DAVIDSON, J. W. Living Writers of the South. 1869.
DE MENIL, A. N. Literature of the Louisiana Territory. 1904.
HOLLIDAY, CARL. History of Southern Literature. 1906.
LINK, S. A. Pioneers of Southern Literature. 1903. 2 vols.
ORGAIN, KATE A. Southern Authors in Poetry and Prose. 1908.
PAINTER, F. V. N. Poets of the South. 1903.
PAINTER, F. V. N. Poets of Virginia. 1907.
Among periodical articles some of the more important are as
follows:
BASKERVILL, W. M. Southern Literature. _Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc._,
Vol. VII, p. 89.
COLEMAN, C. W. Recent Movement in Southern Literature.
_Harper's_, Vol. LXXIV, p. 837.
HENNEMAN, J. B. National Element in Southern Literature.
_Sewanee Review_, Vol. XI, p. 345.
MABIE, H. W. The Poetry of the South. _International Monthly_,
Vol. V, p. 200.
SMITH, C. A. Possibilities of Southern Literature. _Sewanee
Review_, Vol. VI, p. 298.
SNYDER, H. N. The Matter of Southern Literature. _Sewanee
Review_, Vol. XV, p. 218.
TRENT, W. P. Dominant Forces in Southern Life. _Atlantic_, Vol.
LXXIX, p. 42.
WOODBERRY, G. E. The South in American Letters. _Harper's_, Vol.
CVII, p. 735.
=_Individual Authors_=
HENRY TIMROD. Works. Memorial Edition. 1899, 1901. These appeared in
book form originally as follows: Poems, 1860. Complete edition
(edited by Paul Hamilton Hayne), 1873, 1874; Katie, 1884.
=Biography and Criticism=
Memoir prefixed to editions of 1899 and 1901. Sketch with
edition of 1872, by P. H. Hayne.
AUSTIN, H. Henry Timrod. _International Review_, September, 1880.
HAYNE, P. H. Sketch with edition of 1872.
ROSS, C. H. The New Edition of Timrod. _Sewanee Review_,
October, 1899.
ROUTH, J. E. Some Fugitive Poems of Timrod. _South Atlantic
Quarterly_, January, 1903.
WAUCHOPE, G. A. Henry Timrod, Laureate of the Confederacy.
_North Carolina Review_, May 5, 1912.
WAUCHOPE, G. A. Henry Timrod: Man and Poet, a Critical Study.
1915.
See also volumes of history and criticism under General
References, above.
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE. Works. Poems of. Complete edition (his own
selection), with biographical introduction by Margaret Preston.
1882. The work appeared in book form originally as follows: Poems,
1855; Sonnets, and Other Poems, 1857, 1859; Avolio, 1860; Legends
and Lyrics, 1872; The Mountain of the Lovers, 1875; Life of Robert
Y. Hayne, 1878; Life of Hugh S. Legare, 1878.
=Biography and Criticism=
There is no adequate biography of Hayne.
ALLAN, ELIZABETH PRESTON. The Life and Letters of Margaret
Junkin Preston. 1903.
BROWN, J. T., JR. Paul Hamilton Hale. _Sewanee Review_, April,
1906.
LANIER, SIDNEY. Essays. 1899.
MIMS, E. Sidney Lanier. 1905.
PRESTON, MARGARET JUNKIN. Introduction to edition of 1882 (see
above).
See also the Library of Southern Literature, in which the
introduction to the selections from Hayne is well supplemented
by his own reminiscences reprinted from the _Southern
Bivouac_. See also Paul Hamilton Hayne (edited by S. A. Link)
and the passages in the survey histories.
SIDNEY LANIER. Works. Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited by his wife,
with a memorial by William Hayes Ward. 1884. Select poems
of Sidney Lanier, edited with an introduction, notes, and
bibliography, by Morgan Callaway. 1895. (The critical edition.)
Lanier's works appeared in book form originally as follows:
Tiger Lilies, a Novel, 1867; Florida, its Scenery, Climate, and
History, 1876; Poems, 1877; The Boy's Froissart, 1878; The Science
of English Verse, 1880; The Boy's King Arthur, 1880; The Boy's
Mabinogion, 1881; The Boy's Percy, 1882; The English Novel, 1883;
Music and Poetry: Essays, 1898; Retrospects and Prospects, 1899;
Shakespeare and his Forerunners, 1902.
=Bibliographies=
A bibliography prepared for the Southern History Association by
G. S. Wills, July, 1899.
A bibliography appended to Select Poems of Lanier (edited by
Morgan Callaway). 1895. Also Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. II, pp. 600-603.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Edwin Mims. 1905. (_A. M. L. Ser._)
See also Letters of Sidney Lanier. Selections from his
Correspondence, 1866-1881. 1911.
CARROLL, C. C. Synthesis and Analysis of the Poetry of Sidney
Lanier. 1910.
CLARKE, G. H. Some Reminiscences and Early Letters of Sidney
Lanier. 1907.
GILMAN, D. C. Sidney Lanier, Reminiscences and Letters. _South
Atlantic Quarterly_, April, 1905.
GOSSE, EDMUND. Questions at Issue. 1893.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Contemporaries. 1899.
KENT, C. W. A Study of Lanier's Poems. _Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc._,
Vol. VII, pp. 33-63.
MOSES, M. J. The Literature of the South. 1910.
NORTHRUP, M. H. Sidney Lanier, Recollections and Letters.
_Lippincott's_, March, 1905.
TOLMAN, A. H. Views about Hamlet and Other Essays.
TRENT, W. P. Southern Writers. 1905.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the poems or passages alluded to in the text on sentimentalism by
Irving (p. 126), Cooper (p. 148), Bryant (p. 163), Longfellow (p. 269),
and compare with the statement on Timrod.
Compare Timrod's "Cotton Boll" with Bryant's "The Sower" or Lanier's
"Corn" for the imaginative grasp of what had ordinarily been considered
a prosaic subject.
Read the war lyrics of Timrod or Hayne and compare in subject,
treatment, and temper with the corresponding work of a Northern poet.
Read several poems of Lanier taken at random for the allusions to music.
Read Lanier for the evident influence of Shakespeare in supplying
him with poetic material. Is there evidence that he was affected by
Shakespeare's poetic form?
Read the Taylor-Lanier correspondence with reference to the Centennial
Cantata. Does the poem fulfill Lanier's intentions?
Read Lanier's poems and passages on poetry and the poet and compare
them with similar passages in the work of another poet.
Read Lanier, Timrod, or Hayne for the presence of nature allusions
which would be natural only for a poet of the South.