THE POETRY OF THE SOUTH HAMILTON W. MABIE, New York. With the exception of Poe, the Southern poets have not yet received adequate attention at the hands of students and critics of American literature. A brief survey of this considerable group of verse writers may suggest the importance of their work, and its significance in the spiritual history of the country. It is chiefly as a matter of convenience that the Northern poets may be grouped together; in temperament, poetic insight, and interpretation of life they are notable for diversity rather than for similarity. The range of interests and the variations of genius which they present are brought into clear view when one places side by side the work of Emerson and of Holmes, of Whitman and of Aldrich. Tennyson and Browning are not farther apart than Emerson and Whitman; Swinburne and Arnold are not more dissimilar than Whittier and Bayard Taylor. The poets of the South, on the other hand, may be grouped together on the ground of community of temperament. The student of vital conditions in this country might have anticipated that the deepest and richest poetic movement would take place in the South rather than in the North. History has failed to confirm such a prediction; but it remains true that in lyrical quality, in sensitiveness, not so much to ideas as to feeling and sentiment, in simplicity and directness of emotional response to the appeals of beauty in nature, in that capacity for pure song which more than anything else reveals the poetic temperament Copyright, 1902, by Frederiek A. Richardson. and which, in the Elizabethan Age, and for thirty years after, enfolded the work of Shakespeare and Milton with a multitude of beguiling, spontaneous songs, so many and so continuous that the path of great constructive poetry seems to run through a world of pure music,-in this lyrical attitude towards nature and life the Southern poets are at one, from the time of Poe to that of Lanier. The product is not great in mass; it is by no means so comprehensively interpretative of the spiritual history of a great community as is the work of the Northern poets; but so far as it goes, it is pure poetry: it is poetry for the love of beauty rather than poetry for the sake of ideas. It is transparently sincere; its spontaneity gives it fidelity to experience and emotion; it is the poetry of feeling rather than of the intellect. It instinctively passes, when it deals with fundamental aspects of life or of nature, out of the realm of thought into that of feeling; and if it fails to enter the region of great literature, it points the way and predicts the artists of deeper passion and of larger poetic capacity. Before Henry Timrod, no voice of any carrying power was heard in Southern verse: Timrod sounded a new note of penetrating purity and sweetness. He was born in a community in which the sense of local solidarity, the community-consciousness, so to speak,-which has been at once the charm and the limitation of the South, was so intense as to exercise an educational influence of the most searching kind. In the air of Charleston, the moral fervor of the Huguenot had passed into a passion of loyalty to the tradition and inheritance of a community touched from the beginning with the grace and light of idealism in faith and manners. Like Goethe and many another boy of poetic temper, Timrod found in his mother a kind of visible Providence of the imagination, one who recognized the double parentage of her child, and who made him at home in the world of nature, of sentiment, of beauty, and of gladness, where poets are not only born, but made. Paul Hamilton Hayne sat beside him in the school-room and shared his earliest dreams. Timrod was quiet, shy, eager in friendship and in intellectual curiosity; slow of speech, but quick to learn; delighting in the sports of his fellows, but freest and most completely himself when holidays sent him afield; a sensitive boy, reticent with his fellows, but impetuous and ardent of speech with a friend, a spirit touched by beauty and vibrating to the breath of nature. His college opportunities were meagre, but access to the best literature was among them, and he fed his spirit on rich pasturage. The Greek drama did not appeal to him, but he early discovered his kinship with Virgil, Horace, and Catullus. Among English poets, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and, later, Tennyson, were his teachers, and it is not difficult to discover the lyrical direction of his interest and gift. He made a futile attempt to get into working relations with society by adopting law as a vocation. The inconspicuous sign-board of "William Cullen Bryant, Attorney-at-Law" had been taken down from the long street in Plainfield, Mass., and James Russell Lowell had endeavored vainly to pursue the same vocation. Poets have often tried to become lawyers, but no experiment of this kind has yet succeeded. There was a small group of men in Charleston who were actively interested in literature, foremost among whom were Paul Hamilton Hayne and W. Gilmore Simms; and there was in the city, as elsewhere throughout the South, a larger group of those who were so familiar with the best in literature that they not only loved it, but recognized it when it appeared in new places, and came from fresh hands. Timrod was born in 1829, and there was but a brief period of time between his days of preparation and the rising of the curtain on the drama of the Civil War, that "King Lear" among the tragedies of modern history, in its elemental vastness and destructiveness. In the short interval before the storm, Timrod followed the vocation of a teacher, and the avocation of a poet; the first edition of his poems, bearing the imprint of a Boston publishing house, and the date 1860. He found quick recognition at the North, and would doubtless have found there his larger audience, as have all the Southern writers, had not the absorbing passions set free by the war ruthlessly thrust the arts aside for the season. No poet, North or South, felt the sentiment of the conflict more deeply than Timrod, and none gave it a truer lyrical expression. In "Ethnogenesis," written in February, 1861, while the first Southern Congress was debating the issue for the last time before it passed on to its ultimate appeal, he wrote the prelude to the struggle, as Lowell wrote its epilogue in the "Commemoration Ode"; between the two was fashioned that splendid tradition of heroism which not only is a common inheritance for the whole country, but will become a perennial source of inspiration for the national poetry, which is some day to interpret the life of the nation in the complexity of its vast completeness. The misconceptions of the poem are part of the great misunderstanding of the time; its passionate fire, its lyrical freedom, its pulse of stormy music give it lasting value: Nor these alone, But every stock and stone And all the generous wealth it gives to toil, Tree, fruit and flower, and every influence, The winds in our defence Shall seem to blow; to us the hills shall lend And in our stiffened sinews we shall blend The impulsive emotion of the time breaks into still more passionate tones in the long poem on "Carolina," in which, like a far cry, the spirit of Tyrtaeus lives again. On the heart of the future, in which the discords of the past will be hushed while its harmonies abide, the lines of this spirited lyric "shall fall like Marion's bugle-blast." Timrod's inspirations were twofold: the love of his land and people, and the love of nature; and both these springs fed his most notable poem, "The Cotton Boll," which must be ranked with the real achievements of American poetry. In this fine lyric the intensity of Timrod's localism gives sure footing for a superb movement of imagination; the poem has symphonic breadth of construction, with a succession of delicate and subtle motives continually merging into and bringing into clearness the central theme; the poet holding distinctly before us the concrete reality with which he is dealing, while he suggests all the occult and secret processes out of which nature has fashioned it,—its delicate relationships with the universal blossoming and bearing of the earth, and its passage through human need into human use and association. In its large and free movement of imagination, as in Lanier's "Sunrise" and "Song of the Corn," and Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," one catches the possible suggestion, in the poetry of the future, of the continental vastness and richness of the New World. Although not without weak lines, and missing at times complete identification of form and thought, this poem has breadth and nobility of conception, and is touched throughout with the tenderness and grace of deep emotion. Timrod's most ambitious piece of verse, "A Vision of Poesy," is interesting chiefly as it throws light on his conception of the poet's growth and function: the unity between the artist and his work; the sympathy which enables him to divine the hidden experience of his race, and inspires him to speak for and to his fellows; the loyalty to art which makes him a servant of truth in order that he may become a master of the knowledge of life. In his sensitive and impressionable temperament, quickly moved and ardently imaginative, in the directness and simplicity of his attitude and approach to his themes, in the intensity of his patriotic fervor, and in the glow of his tenderness for nature, Timrod represents and interprets the Southern mind and heart more clearly and definitely than does any other poet. It is as a song writer that he will live; and while his range was narrow, and the mass of his work is slight, his place as a lyric poet is secure. He has not yet come to his own, but the wider recognition of his tender and passionate verse is only a question |