Southern poems

Southern Poems is an anthology edited by Charles William Kent, the American literary scholar who lived from 1860 to 1917 and who served as Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Kent was one of the principal figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century effort to establish Southern American literature as a serious field of academic study, alongside the work of his colleagues at Vanderbilt and elsewhere in the post Civil War Southern universities.

The anthology brings together a selection of poetry written by Southern American poets across the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the antebellum and Civil War periods that produced what later critics would call the first significant body of distinctively Southern American verse. The selections typically include Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Sidney Lanier, Father Abram Joseph Ryan, James Mathewes Legaré, and various other figures who had been working in the South during the period when American literary attention was still largely focused on New England.

Kent was working in the broader project of regional American literary recovery that had become important in academic English studies in the United States during the decades after the Civil War. The reunification of the country had created political and cultural pressure for Northern literary institutions to acknowledge that the South had produced serious literature of its own, and editors like Kent were assembling the anthologies and editing the collected works that the universities and colleges needed for actual classroom use.

The selections in Kent’s anthology generally favour the strongest individual lyric poems rather than the longer narrative or polemical pieces that the Southern poets had also produced. Henry Timrod’s Civil War poems are well represented. Sidney Lanier’s musical lyrics get substantial space. Edgar Allan Poe appears as the Southern poet that Northern readers also had to acknowledge as a major figure of American Romanticism more broadly.

The book is mostly of interest now to readers of nineteenth century American Southern poetry and to historians of American literary studies as an academic discipline. It pairs naturally with the various individual collections of the major poets included and with the later twentieth century anthologies of Southern American verse.