Medievalism and the Old South: Metaphors and References in the Works of Poets of the Confederacy

Summary

At least half a dozen Southern poets have acquired the nickname “Poet of the Confederacy.” This was never an official kind of title or even a widely recognized ceremonial one, but it has stuck until today for at least a few of them. Almost all of these poets were well-educated men who also served in the Confederate Army; I know of only one woman who was given that title. My interest in these poets is not just their poetry, which for the most part is highly conventional and sometimes just pedestrian, and I have selected the so-called Poets of the Confederacy for convenience. Many other Southern poets favored the Confederacy, but the particular honorific is meaningful because it coincides with the rise of the Lost Cause narrative, which started in 1869 with the establishment of the Southern Historical Society and really took off in the 1880s, the decade at the end of which the unification of Southern veteran organizations occurred with the founding in 1889 of an overarching organization, the United Confederate Veterans. Google's N-gram supports the connection: the phrase “Poet of the Confederacy” did not come into vogue until 1887, two decades after the end of the Civil War, and one decade after the end of Reconstruction. There is no comparable “Poet of the Union,” as far as I know, though one can find a few informal references to Walt Whitman; the title “Poet of the Confederacy” is clearly the invention of the party that lost and tried to reframe history afterwards.

I wish to acknowledge a few debts: to Dr. Shannon Godlove and other members of the Georgia Medieval Group, at whose 2022 meeting a short version of this chapter was presented; to my dear friend Dr. Alex Kaufman for his guidance and advice; to Dr. Karl Fugelso and the reviewers at Studies in Medievalism; and to the librarians at the Special Collections department of Johns Hopkins, especially Amy Kimball.

The language of chivalry was common parlance ever since Sir Walter Scott took the United States by storm, and especially the South caught a serious case of what Mark Twain called the “Sir Walter Disease,” but for all the talk of honor and chivalry it is difficult to find out precisely what its import is.