E. P. E.
University of Pennsylvania, 15 April, 1918.
“Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale: and like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.”
Dunsany—“The Raft Builders.”
CONTENTS
| Page | |
| Foreword | [3] |
| Chapter I. The Significance of the Southern War Poetry | [7] |
| Chapter II. The Historical Development of the Southern War Poetry | [17] |
| Reference Bibliography | [49] |
| Bibliography of Collections Examined | [50] |
| Bibliography of Anthologies and Confederate Imprints | [51] |
| Abbreviations Used for Anthologies | [56] |
| Abbreviations Used of Collections | [57] |
| Index of Southern War Poems of the Civil War | [58] |
CHAPTER I
The Significance of the Southern War Poetry
“The emotional literature of a people,” wrote one of the greatest of the Southern poets, William Gilmore Simms,[1] “is as necessary to the philosophic historian as the mere detail of events in the progress of a nation.... The mere facts in a history do not always or often indicate the true animus of the action. But in poetry and song the emotional nature is apt to declare itself without reserve ... speaking out with a passion which disdains subterfuge, and through media of imagination and fancy, which are not only without reserve, but which are too coercive in their own nature, too arbitrary in their own influence, to acknowledge any restraint upon that expression which glows or weeps with emotions that gush freshly and freely from the heart.”
Edmund Clarence Stedman[2] put the matter a little differently. Asking what may constitute the significance of any body of rhythmical literature, restricted to its own territory, he answered the question thus: “Undoubtedly and first of all, the essential quality of its material as poetry; next to this, its quality as an expression and interpretation of the time itself. In many an era, the second factor may afford a surer means of estimate than the first, inasmuch as the purely literary result may be nothing rarer than the world already has possessed, nor greatly differing from it: nevertheless it may be the voice of a time, of a generation, of a people ... all of extraordinary import to the world’s future.”