Hayne: looked down upon with contempt

Southern writing suffered a slow development in the early history of the United States, and certainly in the first half of the 19th century. Literary culture was sparse at the time; Southern authors who were successful typically relied on Northern readers for their popularity. Worse, those who did write in the South were scoffed at by their neighbors.

On December 28, 1859, struggling Southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne complained about it to the highly successful Northern poet and editor James Russell Lowell: The "very profession [of poet] ... is looked down upon with contempt." Hayne was particularly bitter because he hoped to use poetry as his sole source of income.

By the date on his letter, Hayne was less than a month shy of his 30th birthday, though he had already published two volumes of poetry and was working on his third. The first, simply titled Poems, was published in 1855 in Boston — not the South. Two years later, his Sonnets, and Other Poems was published in his native Charleston, receiving little attention. Hayne's third book would be printed by Lowell's Boston publishers, Ticknor and Fields.

By the time he died in 1886, Hayne was recognized as the "Poet Laureate of the South" and one of the writers most responsible for a "new South" which respected literature. Some of his works were printed in the Atlantic Monthly while Lowell was the magazine's editor. Here is one of his earlier poems, "The Poet's Trust in His Sorrow":

O God! how sad a doom is mine,
    To human seeming:
Thou hast called on me to resign
So much—much!—all—but the divine
    Delights of dreaming.

I set my dreams to music wild,
    A wealth of measures;
My lays, thank Heaven! are undefiled,
I sport with Fancy as a child
    With golden leisures.

And long as fate, not wholly stern,
    But this shall grant me,
Still with perennial faith to turn
Where Song's unsullied altars hum
    Nought, nought shall daunt me!

What though my worldly state he low
    Beyond redressing;
I own an inner flame whose glow
Makes radiant all the outward show;
    My last great blessing!

Vicksburg: the tempest raged and thundered

The Union army had been attempting to take Vicksburg, Mississippi, for some time. Bombardment of the Confederate stronghold lasted throughout June and July, before the Northerners temporarily abandoned their plans. Both sides knew the importance of Vicksburg; Abraham Lincoln himself called it "the key" to the Civil War. Southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne turned the episode into a poem, "Bombardment of Vicksburg," dated August 6, 1862:

For sixty days, and longer,
  A storm of shell and shot
Rained round as in a flaming shower,

  But still we faltered not.
"If the noble city perish,"
  Our grand young leader said,
"Let the only walls the foe shall scale
  Be the ramparts of the dead!"

For sixty days, and longer,
  The eye of heaven waxed dim,
And e'en throughout God's holy morn,
  O'er Christian's prayer and hymn,
Arose a hissing tumult,
  As if the fiends of air
Strove to engulf the voice of faith
   In the shrieks of their despair.

There was wailing in the houses,
  There was trembling on the marts,
While the tempest raged and thundered,
  'Mid the silent thrill of hearts;
But the Lord, our shield, was with us,
  And ere a month had sped,
Our very women walked the streets
  With scarce one throb of dread.

And the little children gambolled—
  Their pure, bright faces raised,
Just for a wondering moment
  As the huge bombs whirled and blazed
Then turned with silvery laughter,
  To the sports which children love,
Thrice mailed in this instinctive thought,
  That the good God watched above.

Yet the hailing bolts fell faster,
  From scores of flame-clad ships,
And above us, denser, darker,
  Grew the conflict's wild eclipse—
Till a solid cloud closed o'er us,
  Like a type of gloom and ire,
Whence shot a thousand quivering tongues
  Of forked and vengeful fire.

But the unseen hand of angels,
  These death-shafts warned aside,
And the dove of Heavenly mercy
  Ruled o'er the battle tide;
In the houses ceased the wailing,
  And through the war-scarred marts,
The people strode with a step of hope,
  To the music in their hearts.

Simms: left all his better works undone

William Gilmore Simms knew he would die in 1870. "I am rapidly passing from a stage where you young men are to succeed me, doing what you can," he wrote to his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne two days into the new year. "My last days would be cheerless in the last degree but for numerous good friends, who will hardly allow me to suffer... but I am weary, Paul, and having much to say, I must say no more." Simms's health improved slightly in the coming months, but quickly reverted to the point where he was often bound to his couch and rarely left his home — sometimes for weeks at a time. Making matters worse, one of his final stories had been rejected by a magazine, which never returned his incomplete manuscript.

Simms rallied long enough in early May to offer a final public appearance, delivering an opening address for a flower show in his native Charleston. A month later, the poet/novelist/editor wrote his last letter to Hayne, noting his "long and exhausting malady" was overtaking him and that his illness had left him emaciated "to such diminutive proportions" that he would no longer be recognized by his friends. It was 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, 1870 that William Gilmore Simms died, likely from liver disease. Nine years later to the day, the people of Charleston unveiled a memorial to him. Simms had asked that his epitaph note that "he has left all his better works undone."

His "Sonnet—Resignation":

His eye was tearless, but his cheeks were wan;
There sorrow long had set her heavy hand;
Yet was his spirit noble, and a bland
And sweet expression o'er his features ran!
Care had not tutored him to sullenness—
The world's scorn not subdued the natural man:
The sweet milk of his nurture was not less,
Because the world had met him with its ban;
He is above revenges, though he drinks
The bitter draught of malice and of hate;
And still, though in the weary strife he sinks,
They can not make him murmur at his fate;
He suffers, and he feels the pang, but proves
The conqueror, though he falls, for still he loves.

Through fortune's bitterest hour

Photo by Randy Garsee, used with permission

The Charleston Academy of Music hosted an evening of "Dramatic Entertainment" on December 13, 1877 in support of the memorial fund for William Gilmore Simms, the Southern novelist/critic/poet who had died about seven years earlier. One year before his death, an aging Simms had written a special poem for the opening of the Academy, despite being essentially retired. Now, so long after his death, he was recognized as an important icon of South Carolina by the people of that state — including fellow writer and personal friend Paul Hamilton Hayne.

Hayne presented a long monody to Simms, simply titled in his collected works as "W. Gilmore Simms: A Poem." Somewhat shocked at how time has gone away so quickly, Hayne writes that "the past becomes the present to our eyes." The "dismal years" in between have been full of "anguished desolation," "veiled tears," and "despondent sighs." Their "curbless mirth" which once exited has since "vanished like wine-foam." But, summoning the "faithful eyes" that once beamed back at the assembled crowd, they remember the hero who can bring them back to happier days:

The man who toiled through fortune's bitterest hour,
As calmly steadfast and supremely brave,
As if above a fair life's tranquil wave.
Brooded the halcyon with unruffled breast;
The man whose sturdy frame upheld aright,
We meet, (O friends), to consecrate tonight!

In honoring Simms, Hayne recreates him in a form resembling a larger-than-life mythological warrior-poet: he was imbued with "imagination, robed in mystical flame" by angels and nymphs, who give him not only intellect but humor as well. Yet, all this manifested for one purpose according to Hayne:

All that he was, all that he owned, we know
Was lavished freely on one sacred shrine,
The shrine of home and country! from the first
Fresh blush of youth, when merged in sanguine glow,
His life-path seemed a shadowless steep to shine,
Leading forever upward to the stars...

Despite being "shadowless," however, Hayne acknowledges that Simms's life was full of "desperate and embittered strife." Still, Simms's soul was "unconquered and majestic" as he mad it his goal:

           ...not that he might rise
Alone and dominant; but that all men's eyes
Might view, perchance through much brave toil of his,
His country stripped of every filthy weed
Of crime imputed; in thought, word, and deed,
A noble people, none would dare despise.

The poem is, without a doubt, over the top (the italics above are his) and, to a degree, matches the same boisterous style of Simms's own poetry. Hayne refers to Simms as a "vanished genius," a "Titan" with "a Viking mien." When Simms's summoned spirit arises, Hayne refers to him as the "stalwart-statured Simms!" Certainly, the poem must have been inspirational enough to encourage monetary donations. The memorial fund eventually was large enough to commission a bust by John Quincy Adams Ward; it stands today at Battery Park in Charleston, South Carolina.

Simms: a fight against bitter prejudice

In a letter dated January 14, 1859, Paul Hamilton Hayne wrote to his unofficial mentor William Gilmore Simms that the older writer's career had become "a fight against bitter prejudice... [and] mean jealousies." Though this was true of "every true literary athlete," Hayne suggested, this was especially the case for Southerners, even when criticism came from fellow "provincial, narrow-minded" Southerners. He went on:

God help all such combatants. 'Tis almost enough to make one forswear his country. I cannot refrain from picturing to myself your fate, had you removed at any early age to Massachusetts or Europe. Prosperity, praise, 'troops of friends,' and admirers, but not what you now possess, and which must be a proud consolation... under disadvantages which would have sunk a weaker mind and corrupted a less manly and heroic heart.

Many Southerners felt under-appreciated in the world of literary arts throughout much of the 19th century. The Richmond-raised (but New England-born) Edgar Allan Poe, for example, conjectured: "Had [Simms] been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a southerner." Poe elsewhere claimed that New England "lyricists" were a "magnanimous cabal which has so long controlled the destinies of American letters." When the first important anthology of American poetry was published in 1842, Poe was one of several who criticized editor Rufus Griswold for under-representing the South.

After the Civil War, Simms edited his own anthology, War Poetry of the South (1867). When New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow edited his own collection of American poetry, Poems of Places (1874) he specifically noted to Hayne that "as few as possible" of the poems in Simms collection would be represented, "and not of the fiercest."

The same year as Hayne's letter, Simms published the last novel he would ever write in book form, The Cassique of Kiawah — it was published in the North, in New York.

Taylor: one so strong in hope, so rich in bloom

The poet Bayard Taylor died on December 19, 1878. Perhaps the worst part of his death was that he could no longer defend himself from being called "James Bayard Taylor" — never his legal name, though his parents did name him after politician James A. Bayard. The error comes from anthologist Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who encouraged the younger man to publish his poems. Taylor, certainly unable to predict the confusion over his name, dedicated that 1844 volume of poems to Griswold, "as an expression of kind gratitude for the kind encouragement he has shown the author." Griswold, who assisted in the publication of that book, also had "James Bayard Taylor" put on the title page, an error which continues to this day.

Perhaps on a happier note, Taylor's friend Christopher Pearse Cranch paid a posthumous tribute through a sonnet:

Can one so strong in hope, so rich in bloom
   That promised fruit of nobler worth than all
   He yet had given, drop thus with sudden fall?
   The busy brain no more its worth resume?
Can Death for life so versatile find room?
   Still must we fancy thou mayst hear our call
   Across the sea, with no dividing wall
   More dense than space to interpose its doom.
Ah then—farewell, young-hearted, genial friend!
   Farewell, true poet, who didst grow and build
   From thought to thought still upward and still new.
Farewell, unsullied toiler in a guild
   Where some defile their hands, and where so few
   With aims as pure strive faithful to the end.

Another poetic tribute came from Southern writer Paul Hamilton Hayne (appropriate, considering Taylor's attempts to reunite North and South through poetry). Hayne said this poem was inspired in part by a letter Taylor wrote to him only weeks before his death:

"Oft have I fronted Death, nor feared his might!—
To me immortal, this dim Finite seems
Like some waste low-land, crossed by wandering streams
Whose clouded waves scarce catch our yearning sight:
Clearer by far, the imperial Infinite!—
Though its ethereal radiance only gleams
In exaltations of majestic dreams,
Such dreams portray God's heaven of heavens aright!"

Thou blissful Faith! that on death's imminent brink
Thus much of heaven's mysterious truth hast told!
Soul-life aspires, though all the stars should sink;—
Not vain our loftiest Instinct's upward stress,—
Nor hath the immortal Hope shone clear and bold,
To quench at death, his torch in Nothingness!

More from another of Taylor's Southern admirers will be posted in a couple days.

Hayne: from the war-wearied hand

After a five-day siege of Yorktown, Virginia by combined American and French forces, the commander, Charles Cornwallis, and his British troops surrendered on October 19, 1781. Soon after, the British government recognized the independence of the United States.

100 years after the surrender at Yorktown, Southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne commemorated the event in poetry. The American Revolution theme seems unusual for a poet more known for his connection to the Civil War. In a fairly lengthy poem titled "Yorktown Centennial Lyric," dated October 19, 1881, he writes:

Hark! hark! down the century's long reaching slope
To those transports of triumph, those raptures of hope...
And mark how the years melting upward like mist
Which the breath of some splendid enchantment has kissed,
Reveal on the ocean, reveal on the shore
The proud pageant of conquest that graced them of yore.

Hayne notes the difficulty in America's founding ("stubborn the strife ere the conflict was won!") and how the colonists might have lost hope ("the wild whirling war wrack half stifled the sun"). Instead:

The day turned to darkness, the night changed to fire,
Still more fierce waxed the combat, more deadly the ire,
Undimmed by the gloom, in majestic advance,
Oh, behold where they ride o'er the red battle tide,
Those banners united in love as in fame.

Much of the poem is dedicated to the support of France and "the lilies, the luminous lilies of France." Cornwallis, on the other hand, "sharpens his broadsword" which "so oft has reaped rebels like grain."  A bold boast, the poem notes, for a man who will soon be running in fear. The siege ends ("O morning superb!") and the soldiers walk away in silence. They know peace is upon them:

When Peace to her own, timed the pulse of the land,
And the war weapon sank from the war-wearied hand,
Young Freedom upborne to the height of the goal
 She had yearned for so long with deep travail of soul,
A song of her future raised, thrilling and clear,
Till the woods learned to hearken, the hill slopes to hear: —
Yet fraught with all magical grandeurs that gleam
On the hero's high hope, or the patriot's dream,
What future, though bright, in cold shadow shall cast
The proud beauty that haloes the brow of the past.

Hayne and Simms: whom I love & respect

Few writers define the American South as well as William Gilmore Simms (primarily remembered as a novelist) and Paul Hamilton Hayne (called "The Poet Laureate of the South"). Both were born in Charleston, South Carolina, though 24 years apart.

Hayne, the younger of the two, considered Simms an unofficial mentor in his early career, before they had even met. In the 1860s, they became acquainted and soon were friends. Simms was a booster for Russell Magazine, which Haynes edited. But, Simms was also a literary critic, one who often was a bit acidic in his reviews. In 1859, he reviewed Haynes's collection Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos and, though he liked the book, noted the poet's shortcomings, a "lack of care and finish." He identified his "defects" as focusing too much on the overuse of "superlatives and compound epithets" and for writing far too many sonnets.

Even as the two writers became friends, Hayne occasionally thought Simms was too harsh. In his journal on August 15, 1864, he noted that this "venerable critic (whom I love & respect)" is crotchety:

If his criticisms are now & then profound & suggestive, they are more frequently distinguished by principles partial & one-sided; nay! sometimes absolutely puerile!

Elsewhere, Hayne noted that Simms was an "old fellow on his high horse!" — though he also admitted: "I don't mind him in the least; he means well." Simms, in turn, referred to Hayne as "my dear Paul" and "the younger brother of my guild."

Below is an untitled sonnet collected in Hayne's Avolio:

Here, friend! upon this lofty ledge sit down!
And view the beauteous prospect spread below,
Around, above us; in the noon-day glow
How calm the landscape rests! — 'yon distant town,
Enwreathed with clouds of foliage like a crown
Of rustic honor; the soft, silvery flow
Of the clear stream beyond it, and the show
Of endless wooded heights, circling the brown
Autumnal fields, alive with billowy grain;
Say! hast thou ever gazed on aught more fair
In Europe, or the Orient? — what domain
(From India to the sunny slopes of Spain)
Hath beauty, wed to grandeur in the air,
Blessed with an ampler charm, a more benignant reign?

Death of Paul Hamilton Hayne

When Charleston, South Carolina was bombarded during the Civil War, Paul Hamilton Hayne lost his home and his ample library to an exploding shell. His first book of poems was published only a few years earlier in 1855 when he was 25. He published two others by the time he was 30.

Hayne refused to let the Civil War deter him from his path of poetry, especially after his health kept him from fulfilling a term of enlistment. He moved to a new home in Georgia, one which he described as "a crazy wooden shanty, dignified as a cottage... Our little apology for a dwelling was perched on the top of a hill, overlooking in several directions hundreds of leagues of pine barren... A wilder, more desolate and savage-looking home could hardly have been seen east of the prairies." His writing desk was a workbench left behind by carpenters.

Life became somewhat isolated for Hayne, who died at this home he named Copse Hill on July 6, 1886. He was 56 years old. His new home provided him ample inspiration and his post-bellum works included the poem "From the Woods" and the collection Mountain of the Lovers. He has been nicknamed the Poet Laureate of the South and, though he embraced Southern themes in his writing, also proudly noted his appreciation of northern poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Hayne's own place in the literary canon is questionable (as are most Southern writers from this period, be it Albert Pike, William Gilmore Simms, or Hayne's good friend Henry Timrod). He may have been his own worst critic. On his personal copy of one of his early books, he scribbled, "Boyish and bombastic! Should have been whipped for publishing it!"

"Great Poets and Small"

Shall I not falter on melodious wing,
In that my notes are weak and may not rise
To those world-wide entrancing harmonies,
Which the great poets to the ages sing?
Shall my thought's humble heaven no longer ring
With pleasant lays, because the empyreal height
Stretches beyond it, lifting to the light
The anointed pinion of song's radiant king?
Ah! a false thought! the thrush her fitful flight
Ventures in vernal dawns; a happy note
Trills from the russet linnet's gentle throat,
Though far above the eagle soars in might,
And the glad skylark — an ethereal mote —
Sings in high realms that mock our straining sight.