Text: Anonymous, “Literature in the North and South,” Portland Daily Press (Portland, ME), vol. I, no. 163, January 1, 1863, p. 4, col. 1

We have been told that the highest culture of the New World is to he found, where alone that leisure essential to culture existed, among the planters of the South; but it is a remarkable fact that, while the literature of the North has been hitherto inferior to that of any European state, the South has produced no literature at all. It is true that Edgar Allen [[Allan]] Poe was a Virginian; but all the other poets whom we shall have occasion to mention, by birth, and he himself by adoption, with all the great prose writers of America belong to the Northern States. To the names of Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Irving, and Emerson, the Carolinas can only oppose the genius of their one great orator, Daniel Webster. In explaining this fact we must first take into account the influence of climate. The eastern races, if we are to include the Hebrews under that category, have produced some of the grandest poetry the world has ever seen; but, whether we look to India or Louisiana, it would seem that there is something in the fire of a tropical sun which takes the poetic fire out of the Anglo-Saxon veins. The indolence which is the natural concomitant of despotism has the same benumbing effect. The Spartan marshaling his helots, the English officer drilling his sepoys, the American planter lounging among his slaves, self-centered and self-satisfied, learns to look down on his real or imaginary interiors; it is on those who are stirred to strain upward to things above them that inspiration descends. Literature generally, and poetry above all things, is fed upon Freedom. There have been no poets worth miming in Austria for the last fifty years. With the exception of the wonderful Virginian, who seems to have been born to defy every rule, all the American pods of note have recorded their protest against the “peculiar institution” of their country. However it be regarding questions of government, we must turn for all the vitality, all the aspiration, all the scant performance and large promise of American literature, to New England.