Text: Anonymous, “An Hour Among the Southern Poets,” Southern Punch (Richmond, VA), vol. I, no. 12, pp. 2-3

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AN HOUR AMONG THE SOUTHERN POETS,

When we run our eyes over the long, grand line of bards — commencing with the blind old man or Scio, and coming down to Poe and Tennyson — it cannot be regarded otherwise than a proud distinction to be ranked among the poets.

They are God's favorites, these glorious bards, having a finer grain and sublimer mission than usually falls to the lot of mortals.

Preachers, teachers, prophets — men who think and write for all time — are these masters of the lyre. And, looking at the visions of beauty which they raise up, until visions become palpable realities; at the glory with which they invest historic personages, and their marvelous insight into the mysteries of Nature; looking at their lofty aspirations, their refining power, their exquisite perception of the Ideal, their wonderful intuitive knowledge of the heart, and their glowing and immortal pictures of life, matched from the shadowy Past, we are lost in admiration of the power of these Bards.

Philip Pendleton Cooke has thrown into fourteen stanzas the historic past of England. It is an epitome of what the English poets have written, and he tings, at the conclusion, a fitting pean to the Island Kings of Authorland:

So, to be ranked among the poets is a proud distinction — an admission from men that Heaven has showered upon them [column 2:] the glory of supernal thought, and marked out for them an exalted mission in this world and the world to come.

We come into the presence of Genius with feelings akin to those of the old worshipers, who trod, with their shoes off, the floor or the temple wherein the light of the Shekinahshone. The Mammon worshiper, the merely world-wise and world-lover, are approached with other sentiments. We respect them, as we respect every thing created by the Sublime Intelligence, but they “smell of mortality,” like the hand of Lear — they have about them the odor of earth, not of Heaven.

These are the people who brainlessly laugh at the “high art of the poet,” who deride the “maker of the lays,” and throw down a book of ballads with insufferable insolence and disdain. These are the people who, in a vain attempt to depreciate the poet, depreciate themselves in the estimation of every man of thought, sense and taste.

In America, the taste for letters has not kept pace with the spread of commerce, and so we have comparatively little literary taste in purely commercial marts.

In Europe, literature chiefly flourishes in insulated cities — at Leipsic and Weimar, for example — far away from ships and steam whistles. There, authors are lionized and books read, and there, like that Duke Charles, buried between Goethe and Schiller,

Men, in this age of commerce, mostly read the dispatches in the papers, bolt their dinners, and rush into the hurly-burly of business existence.

We must elevate the taste of our people, educate them up to a high literary point, and teach them that money getting is not the mission of man upon earth!

The surest way to bring about a reform, which will be honorable to the future mind of the country, is to commence the work in the schools, and when another generation comes upon tho stage of action, the literature of the Confederate States may take its place upon the book-shelves of the Leipsics and Weimars of the world.

Sparta, through other historians and poets than its own, comes down to us as a Republic in which brute courage was cherished above all other gifts. — Athenia is renowned for the courage of its people, and its devotion to poetry, painting and sculpture. Sparta's glory is like that of the moon, whoso light is but tho reflection of another luminary, Athenia's glory, like the light of the sun, is fresh, original and universal.

Genius, What is It?

The question has been asked, what is Genius — that creative art-power which individualizes the artist, belonging to him, and to none other?

Johnson defines it to be, “a kind of general powers accidentally determined by some particular direction!” Now, the ponderous old gentleman, who [column 3:] startled the Hebrideans with the sound of his staff striking upon the Island rocks, wrote the Life of Savage for bread, and when Walter Harte, the projector of the Gentleman's Magazine, praised the work to Cave, the bookseller, Johnson was skulking behind a screen, with a dress so shabby that he dared not make his appearance, receiving a plate of victuals from his friend. Is it not probable that this Otwayan bread hunger determined the definition of Genius, as prejudice against the Scotch caused the lexicographer to define oats to be “a grain used in England for horses, in Scotland for men!”

It his been said that Sir Joshua Reynolds had his first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's Treatise. But then, the elements of artistic originality and beauty were inherent in his nature, and only required stimulatiny to develop them.

West told Rogers, that when a child, his mother set him to watch an infant. The sweet, placid, beautiful face of the little sleeper daguerreotyped its image upon his mind, and he proceeded to make a sketch of it. When his mother returned, the infantile face was covered with flies, and she chid him for his negligence. — Curiosity induced her, a moment afterward. to look at the paper in his hand, and she was so struck with the resemblance of the sketch to the face of the infant, that she caught him in her arms and kissed him. “That kiss did it!” exclaimed West. The kiss was the stimulant which encouraged and developed his genius.

Corneille loved; he made verses for his mistress, composed Melito and his other celebrated poems. The lady's eyes only lit the slumbering embers of genius in the soul of the French poet — passion but developed that which was already there.

Akenside, in his fine poem — which is itself a history of Genius — in tracing its source, sang:

Akenside was right. God has the creative faculty in an infinite, man in a finite degree. The finite creative faculty of man corresponds with the infinite of the Creator. Genius is a supernal gift, and is that combined faculty of tho mind and soul which possesses the power of idealic creation and electrification, gives to tangibilities the hue of the Ideal, and to intangibilities the hue of the Real.

It is delightful, now and then, to escape from the monotonous pent-up-titude of secular life, and get among tho poets. The “day in and day out” whirl, bustle and confusion of the metropolis, grow wearisome and lose their astractions [[abstractions]].

Not so when rid of them for an hour, mind free and soul free in the elevating atmosphere of the spiritualistic, the sublime and the beautiful in the illimitable Universe of Thought. One grows calmer, better, purer, in this brief Sabbath [column 4:] of Mind — brief in hours, but years long in the duration of intellectual enjoyment.

Edgar A . Poe.

Here is Edgar A. Poe, the brilliantest literary genius that America has produced. He lived only thirty-eight years, and yet lived immeasurably longer than yon dull, money-loving octogenarian. This rain dwelt, tho greater part of his life, in the grand temple of God-like Though, peopled with weird Titanic shapes and radiant creations of angelic beauty. He dreamed there of Lenore in her Aiden of happiness; he heard the melancholy Raven answer him from the bust of Pallas above his door; fie lingered “down by the dim Lake of Auber;” by the tomb of Ullalume — and, looking out from the window of the great Thought-temple, he caught the sound of bells, whose melody kept time to the beat of the poetic heart.

With our finger upon this remarkable poem, “The Bells,” we unhesitatingly declare, that nothing in the whole range of literature equals its exquisite word-music. It almost sings itself, so perfect is its rhythmical harmony. Listen to the sound of sleigh bells:

When quickly and properly read, the imitation of sleigh bells is perfect. So wonderfully artistic is it that the reader, brought en rapport with the poof, hear the first low starting sound of the bells grow more and more distinct, when tho sledge, flying over tho snow, causes the little instruments to gallop through their tinkling gamut.

Here is a portion of his description of fire bells:

Is it any wonder that this adroit analyzer of sound could write the intricate police story of “The Murderers [[Murders]] of the Rue Morgue,” which challenged the admiration of the Savant of Paris; and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” [page 3:] which deceived some of the first minds in Europe into the belief that it was a report of actual mesmeric phenomenon.

Poe laughed at the English prosodists. He scorned the time-honored yard-sticks wherewith verse was measured as clerks measure satins for fine ladies, His “Rationale of Verse” gives the death-blow to many an old fashioned error, and revolutionized the public mind as to the structure of verse, “The poetic principle” is, he says, ‘'strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty.” The poetry of words he defines, “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty — its sole arbiter, Taste.”

We put aside these bound remains of Poe, a man whose conversation was pronounced to be “supra-mortal,” and whose literary labors to-day, translated, lie side by side with those of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, and the rest, in the libraries of the scholarly men on the banks of the White Elster.

The hyenas of literature have invaded the grave, and attempted to drag forth to popular detestation the illustrious dead. We have no sympathy for bad men. The grave does not sanctify errors and crimes. If it did, Nero, Caligula and Judas Iscariot deserve canonization.

From the evidence before us, his enemies being judges, Poe may take rank among those men of genius who have been misunderstood. This has been the fate of the gifted since the days of Homer