QUESTIONS, i. What characteristics of the Virginians are set forth?
2. By what means did they attempt to repair their lost fortunes in the Flush Times? Other Humorists. Among the writers of humorous sketches are several others of somewhat less importance than those represented in this book. The list would include the following. Alabama: Johnson Jones Hooper (1815-1863); Tennes see: George Washington Harris (1814-1869); Georgia: John Basil Lamar (1812- 1862), Charles Henry Smith (" Bill Arp") (1826-1903); Louisiana and Arkansas: Thomas Bangs Thorp (1815-1878).
POETS
What was found to be true of Southern prose in antebellum times that it was literature of effort rather than accomplishment is likewise true of the poetry of this period. The quantity was surprisingly large. The statement has been made that a list of approximately two hundred and fifty writers of verse could be made out, from 1805 to 1860, and that there was not a year in which numbers of volumes of poetry were published. Yet in all this company there were few who can be called writers of genuine power. It is strange that the South, the home of a great people, had no great poet before the war. Poe was, to be sure, great in many respects, but he was not great enough in interest in real life to be called an interpreter of Southern life in his poetry. Poetry in the South before the war was largely written by amateurs. It was looked upon, as Paul Hamilton Hayne has declared, as "the choice recreation of gentlemen, as something fair and good, to be courted in a dainty amateur fashion." In consequence, there is not the great thought and deep passion of masterpieces, but a general air of amateurishness. There is also upon it, as in all Southern literature of this time except the humor, the mark of imitation and, so, of artificiality. It never seemed simple, natural, unforced. Furthermore, the Southern poet was unfortunate in his models. Instead of going to the serious, elevated poems of Wordsworth or to the greater poetry of Byron, he took as his models the light, graceful work of the Cavalier lyrists, Suckling, Herrick, and Carew, or the sentimentalism of Tom Moore, or the rhetoric of Byron, or perhaps the faultless but insipid early poems of Tennyson. As to the theme, it was generally love, fortunate or the reverse, although the whole gamut of the Muse s lyre was run in kind and in subject matter. The Southern poets, moreover, had less
