Poets of the South | Page 2

states. The system
of slavery, while building up baronial homes of wealth, culture, and
boundless hospitality, checked manufacture, retarded the growth of
cities, and turned the tide of immigration westward. Without a vigorous
public school system, a considerable part of the non-slaveholding class
remained without literary taste or culture.
The South has been chiefly an agricultural region, and has adhered to
conservative habits of thought. While various movements in theology,
philosophy, and literature were stirring New England, the South
pursued the even tenor of its way. Of all parts of our country, it has
been most tenacious of old customs and beliefs. Before the Civil War
the cultivated classes of the Southern states found their intellectual
nourishment in the older English classics, and Pope, Addison, and
Shakespeare formed a part of every gentleman's library. There were no
great publishing houses to stimulate literary production; and to this day

Southern writers are dependent chiefly on Northern publishers to give
their works to the public. Literature was hardly taken seriously; it was
rather regarded, to use the words of Paul Hamilton Hayne, "as the
choice recreation of gentlemen, as something fair and good, to be
courted in a dainty, amateur fashion, and illustrated by apropos
quotations from Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace." Thus it happened that
before the Civil War literature in the South, whether prose or poetry,
had a less vigorous development than in the Middle States and New
England.
Yet it has been common to undervalue the literary work of the South.
While literature was not generally encouraged there before the Civil
War,--a fact lamented by gifted, representative writers,--there were at
least two literary centers that exerted a notable influence. The first was
Richmond, the home of Poe during his earlier years, and of the
Southern Literary Messenger, in its day the most influential magazine
south of the Potomac. It was founded, as set forth in its first issue, in
1834, to encourage literature in Virginia and the other states of the
South; and during its career of twenty-eight years it stimulated literary
activity in a remarkable degree. Among its contributors we find Poe,
Simms, Hayne, Timrod, John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and
others--a galaxy of the best-known names in Southern literature.
The other principal literary center of the South was Charleston.
"Legaré's wit and scholarship," to adopt the words of Mrs. Margaret J.
Preston, "brightened its social circle; Calhoun's deep shadow loomed
over it from his plantation at Fort Hill; Gilmore Simms's genial culture
broadened its sympathies. The latter was the Maecenas to a band of
brilliant youths who used to meet for literary suppers at his beautiful
home." Among these brilliant youths were Paul Hamilton Hayne and
Henry Timrod, two of the best poets the South has produced. The
_Southern Literary Gazette_, founded by Simms, and Russell's
Magazine, edited by Hayne, were published at Charleston. Louisville
and New Orleans were likewise literary centers of more or less
influence.
Yet it is a notable fact that none of these literary centers gave rise to a

distinctive group or school of writers. The influence of these centers
did not consist in one great dominating principle, but in a general
stimulus to literary effort. In this respect it may be fairly claimed that
the South was more cosmopolitan than the North. In New England,
theology and transcendentalism in turn dominated literature; and not a
few of the group of writers who contributed to the Atlantic Monthly
were profoundly influenced by the anti-slavery agitation. They
struggled up Parnassus, to use the words of Lowell,--
"With a whole bale of isms tied together with rime."
But the leading writers of the South, as will be seen later, have been
exempt, in large measure, from the narrowing influence of one-sided
theological or philosophical tenets. They have not aspired to the rôle of
social reformers; and in their loyalty to art, they have abstained from
fanatical energy and extravagance.
The major poets of the South stand out in strong, isolated individuality.
They were not bound together by any sympathy other than that of a
common interest in art and in their Southern home. Their genius was
nourished on the choicest literary productions of England and of classic
antiquity; and looking, with this Old World culture, upon Southern
landscape and Southern character, they pictured or interpreted them in
the language of poetry.
The three leading poets of the Civil War period--Hayne, Timrod, and
Ryan --keenly felt the issues involved in that great struggle. All three of
them were connected, for a time at least, with the Confederate army. In
the earlier stages of the conflict, the intensity of their Southern feeling
flamed out in thrilling lyrics. Timrod's martial songs throb with the
energy of deep emotion. But all three poets lived to accept the results of
the war,