Compare Timrod’s “Cotton Boll” with Bryant’s “The Sower” or Lanier’s “Corn” for the imaginative grasp of what had ordinarily been considered a prosaic subject.
Read the war lyrics of Timrod or Hayne and compare in subject, treatment, and temper with the corresponding work of a Northern poet.
Read several poems of Lanier taken at random for the allusions to music.
Read Lanier for the evident influence of Shakespeare in supplying him with poetic material. Is there evidence that he was affected by Shakespeare’s poetic form?
Read the Taylor-Lanier correspondence with reference to the Centennial Cantata. Does the poem fulfill Lanier’s intentions?
Read Lanier’s poems and passages on poetry and the poet and compare them with similar passages in the work of another poet.
Read Lanier, Timrod, or Hayne for the presence of nature allusions which would be natural only for a poet of the South.
CHAPTER XXIV
WALT WHITMAN
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Mark Twain are the two authors whom the rest of the world have chosen to regard as distinctively American. They are in fact more strikingly different from European writers than any other two in their outer and inner reaction against cultural tradition, though it is an error to regard Americanism as an utterly new thing instead of a compound of new and old elements. Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819: