Poets of the South Part 1

Poets of the South.

by F.V.N. Painter.

PREFACE

The poets of the South, who const.i.tute a worthy galaxy of poetic talent and achievement, are not sufficiently known. Even in the South, which might naturally be expected to take pride in its gifted singers, most of them, it is to be feared, are but little read.

This has been called an age of prose. Under the sway of what are regarded as "practical interests," there is a drifting away from poetic sentiment and poetic truth. This tendency is to be regretted, for material prosperity is never at its best without the grace and refinements of true culture. At the present time, as in former ages, the gifted poet is a seer, who reveals to us what is highest and best in life.

There is at present a new interest in literature in the South. The people read more; and in recent years an encouraging number of Southern writers have achieved national distinction. With this literary renaissance, there has been a turning back to older authors.

It is hoped that this little volume will supply a real need. It is intended to call fresh attention to the poetic achievement of the South.

While minor poets are not forgotten, among whose writings is found many a gem of poetry, it is the leaders of the chorus--Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan--who receive chief consideration. It may be doubted whether several of them have been given the place in American letters to which their gifts and achievements justly ent.i.tle them. It is hoped that the following biographical and critical sketches of these men, each highly gifted in his own way, will lead to a more careful reading of their works, in which, be it said to their honor, there is no thought or sentiment unworthy of a refined and chivalrous nature.

F. V. N. PAINTER.

SALEM, VIRGINIA.

CHAPTER I

MINOR POETS OF THE SOUTH

The first poetic writer of this country had his home at Jamestown. He was GEORGE SANDYS who came to Virginia in 1621, and succeeded his brother as treasurer of the newly established colony. Amid the hardships of pioneer colonial life, in which he proved himself a leading spirit, he had the literary zeal to complete his translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, which he had begun in England. After the toilsome day, spent in introducing iron works or in encouraging shipbuilding, he sat down at night, within the shadow of surrounding forests, to construct his careful, rhymed pentameters. The conditions under which he wrote were very far removed from the Golden Age which he described,--

"Which uncompelled And without rule, in faith and truth, excelled."

The promise of this bright, heroic beginning in poetry was not realized; and scarcely another voice was heard in verse in the South before the Revolution. The type of civilization developed in the South prior to the Civil War, admirable as it was in many other particulars, was hardly favorable to literature. The energies of the most intelligent portion of the population were directed to agriculture or to politics; and many of the foremost statesmen of our country--men like Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Calhoun, Benton--were from the Southern states. The system of slavery, while building up baronial homes of wealth, culture, and boundless hospitality, checked manufacture, r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of cities, and turned the tide of immigration westward. Without a vigorous public school system, a considerable part of the non-slaveholding cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses of the Southern states found their intellectual nourishment in the older English cla.s.sics, 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 princ.i.p.al literary center of the South was Charleston.

"Legare'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 Parna.s.sus, 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 role 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 cla.s.sic 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, and to sing a new loyalty to our great Republic.

The South has not been as unfruitful in literature as is often supposed.

While there have been very few to make literature a vocation, a surprisingly large number have made it an avocation. Law and literature, as we shall have occasion to note, have frequently gone hand in hand. A recent work on Southern literature [*] enumerates more than twelve hundred writers, most of whom have published one or more volumes.

There are more than two hundred poets who have been thought worthy of mention. More than fifty poets have been credited to Virginia alone; and an examination of their works reveals, among a good deal that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that ought to be preserved.

Apart from the five major poets of the South--Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan--who are reserved for special study, we shall now consider a few of the minor poets who have produced verse of excellent quality.

[Footnote *: Manly's _Southern Literature._]

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780-1843) is known throughout the land as the author of _The Star-spangled Banner_, the n.o.blest, perhaps, of our patriotic hymns. He was born in Frederick County, Maryland, and was educated at St. John's College, Annapolis. He studied law, and after practicing with success in Frederick City, he removed to Washington, where he became district attorney.

During the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, he was detained on board a British vessel, whither he had gone to secure the release of a friend. All night long he watched the bombardment with the keenest anxiety. In the morning, when the dawn disclosed the star- spangled banner still proudly waving over the fort, he conceived the stirring song, which at once became popular and was sung all over the country. Though a volume of his poems, with a sketch by Chief-Justice Taney, was published in 1857, it is to _The Star-spangled Banner_ that he owes his literary fame.

"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Few poems written in the South have been more popular than _My Life is like the Summer Rose_. It has the distinction of having been praised by Byron. Its author, RICHARD HENRY WILDE (1789-1847), was born in Dublin, Ireland, but brought up and educated in Augusta, Georgia. He studied law, became attorney general of his adopted state, and later entered Congress, where he served for several terms. He was a man of scholarly tastes and poetic gifts. He spent five years abroad, chiefly in Italy, where his studies in Italian literature afterwards led to a work on Torquato Ta.s.so. It was on the occasion of this trip abroad that he wrote _A Farewell to America_, which breathes a n.o.ble spirit of patriotism:--

"Farewell, my more than fatherland!

Home of my heart and friends, adieu!

Lingering beside some foreign strand, How oft shall I remember you!

How often, o'er the waters blue, Send back a sigh to those I leave, The loving and beloved few, Who grieve for me,--for whom I grieve!"

On his return to America, he settled in New Orleans, where he became a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy lyric, _My Life is like the Summer Rose_, that, more than all the rest, has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote a stanza of a poem so well known?

"My life is like the summer rose, That opens to the morning sky, But, ere the shades of evening close, Is scattered on the ground--to die!

Yet on the rose's humble bed The sweetest dews of night are shed, As if she wept the waste to see-- But none shall weep a tear for me!"

GEORGE D. PRENTICE (1802-1870) was a native of Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University, and studied law; but he soon gave up his profession for the more congenial pursuit of literature. In 1828 he established at Hartford the _New England Weekly Review_, in which a number of his poems, serious and sentimental, appeared. Two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he turned over his paper to Whittier and removed to Louisville, where he became editor of the _Journal_.

He was a man of brilliant intellect, and soon made his paper a power in education, society, and politics. Apart from his own vigorous contributions, he made his paper useful to Southern letters by encouraging literary activity in others. It was chiefly through his influence that Louisville became one of the literary centers of the South. He was a stout opponent of secession; and when the Civil War came his paper, like his adopted state, suffered severely.

Among his writings is a _Life of Henry Clay_. A collection of his witty and pungent paragraphs has also been published under the t.i.tle of _Prenticeana_. His poems, by which he will be longest remembered, were collected after his death. His best-known poem is _The Closing Year_.

Though its vividness and eloquence are quite remarkable, its style is, perhaps, too declamatory for the taste of the present generation.

The following lines, which express the poet's bright hopes for the political future of the world, are taken from _The Flight of Years_:--

"Weep not, that Time Is pa.s.sing on--it will ere long reveal A brighter era to the nations. Hark!

Along the vales and mountains of the earth There is a deep, portentous murmuring Like the swift rush of subterranean streams, Or like the mingled sounds of earth and air, When the fierce Tempest, with sonorous wing, Heaves his deep folds upon the rushing winds, And hurries onward with his night of clouds Against the eternal mountains. 'Tis the voice Of infant _Freedom_--and her stirring call Is heard and answered in a thousand tones From every hilltop of her western home---- And lo--it breaks across old Ocean's flood---- And _Freedom, Freedom!_ is the answering shout Of nations starting from the spell of years.

The dayspring!--see--'tis brightening in the heavens!

The watchmen of the night have caught the sign---- From tower to tower the signal fires flash free---- And the deep watchword, like the rush of seas That heralds the volcano's bursting flame, Is sounding o'er the earth. Bright years of hope And life are on the wing.--Yon glorious bow Of Freedom, bended by the hand of G.o.d, Is spanning Time's dark surges. Its high arch, A type of love and mercy on the cloud, Tells that the many storms of human life Will pa.s.s in silence, and the sinking waves, Gathering the forms of glory and of peace, Reflect the undimmed brightness of the Heaven."

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806-1870), a native of Charleston, was a man of remarkable versatility. He made up for his lack of collegiate training by private study and wide experience. He early gave up law for literature, and during his long and tireless literary career was editor, poet, dramatist, historian, and novelist. He had something of the wideness of range of Sir Walter Scott; and one can not but think that, had he lived north of Mason and Dixon's line, he might occupy a more prominent place in the literary annals of our country. He has been styled the "Cooper of the South"; but it is hardly too much to say that in versatility, culture, and literary productiveness he surpa.s.sed his great Northern contemporary.

Simms was a poet before he became a novelist. The poetic impulse manifested itself early; and before he was twenty-five he had published three or more volumes of verse. In 1832 his imaginative poem, _Atalantis, a Story of the Sea_, was brought out by the Harpers; and it introduced him at once to the favorable notice of what Poe called the "Literati" of New York. His subsequent volumes of poetry were devoted chiefly to a description of Southern scenes and incidents.