Poets of the South / A Series of Biographical and Critical Studies with Typical Poems, Annotated

by F. V. N. Painter

"Around the social board
The impetuous flood tide poured
Of curbless mirth, and keen sparkling jest
Vanished like wine-foam on its golden crest."

During all these years of toil and waiting the poetic muse was not idle. Under the pseudonym "Aglaus," the name of a minor pastoral poet of Greece, he became a frequent and favorite contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond, Virginia. Later he became one of the principal contributors, both in prose and poetry, to Russell's Magazine in Charleston. It was in these periodicals that the foundation of his fame was laid.

Timrod's first volume of poetry, made up of pieces taken chiefly from these magazines, appeared in 1860, from the press of Ticknor & Fields, Boston. It was Hayne's judgment that "a better first volume of the kind has seldom appeared anywhere." It contains most of the pieces found in subsequent editions of his works. Here and there, both North and South, a discerning critic recognized in the poet "a lively, delicate fancy, and a graceful beauty of expression." But, upon the whole, the book attracted little attention—a fact that came to the poet as a deep disappointment. In the words of Dr. Bruns, who was familiar with the circumstances of the poet, "success was to him a bitter need, for not his living merely, but his life was staked upon it."

When this volume appeared, Timrod was more than a poetic tyro. Apart from native inspiration, in which he was surpassed by few of his contemporaries, he had reflected profoundly on his art, and nursed his genius on the masterpieces of English song. In addition to Shakespeare he had carefully pondered Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. From Wordsworth especially he learned to appreciate the poetry of common things, and to discern the mystic presence of that spirit,—

"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."

Timrod, like Poe, formulated a theory of poetry which it is interesting to study, as it throws light on his own work. It reveals to us the ideal at which he aimed. In a famous essay Poe made beauty the sole realm and end of poetry. To Timrod belongs the credit of setting forth a larger and juster conception of the poetic art. To beauty he adds power and truth as legitimate sources of poetry. "I think," he says, "when we recall the many and varied sources of poetry, we must, perforce, confess that it is wholly impossible to reduce them all to the simple element of beauty. Two other elements, at least, must be added, and these are power, when it is developed in some noble shape, and truth, whether abstract or not, when it affects the common heart of mankind."

Timrod regarded a poem as a work of art. He justly held that a poem should have "one purpose, and that the materials of which it is composed should be so selected and arranged as to help enforce it." He distinguished between the moment of inspiration, "when the great thought strikes for the first time along the brain and flushes the cheek with the sudden revelation of beauty or grandeur, and the hour of patient, elaborate execution." Accordingly he quoted with approval the lines of Matthew Arnold:—

"We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still;
In mystery our soul abides;
But tasks in hours of insight willed,
May be through hours of gloom fulfilled."

Timrod's poetry is characterized by clearness, simplicity, and force. He was not a mystic; his thoughts and emotions are not obscured in voluble melody. To him poetry is more than rhythmic harmony. Beneath his delicate imagery and rhythmical sweetness are poured treasures of thought and truth. In diction he belongs to the school of Wordsworth; his language is not strained or farfetched, but such as is natural to cultured men in a state of emotion. "Poetry," he says in an early volume of Russell's Magazine, "does not deal in abstractions. However abstract be his thought, the poet is compelled, by his passion-fused imagination, to give it life, form, or color. Hence the necessity of employing the sensuous or concrete words of the language, and hence the exclusion of long words, which in English are nearly all purely and austerely abstract, from the poetic vocabulary."

He defends the use of the sonnet, in which, like Hayne, he excelled. He admits that the sonnet is artificial in structure; but, as already pointed out, he distinguishes the moment of inspiration, from the subsequent labor of composition. In the act of writing, the poet passes into the artist. And "the very restriction so much complained of in the sonnet," he says, "the artist knows to be an advantage. It forces him to condensation." His sonnets are characterized by a rare lucidity of thought and expression.