The Southern war poetry of the Civil War

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 poe...