[In the following excerpt, Holman stresses the economic and cultural grounds for the dearth of accomplished Southern literature during the years 1800 to 1865, seeing Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod as the only professional writers of merit in the Old South and Poe as its only artist of genius.]

To understand the literature produced in the South between 1800 and 1865, it is important to keep certain characteristics of the region and its people in mind, and to remember that the standard monolithic view of the South was late in forming and was always a concept imposed upon an actuality that it never fitted well.

Since the eighteenth century, there had been at least two distinct ways of life in the South, which were marked by geography, by settlement, and by religion. English settlers along the coastal plain, largely Episcopal in religion and Cavalier in attitude if not by birth, established a society marked by the ideals of a genteel aristocracy and a polished conservatism. In the rolling piedmont hills and the Appalachian mountains were settlements by Scotch-Irish immigrants who came down the cattle trails from Pennsylvania through the Great Valley and fanned out to join with equally austere German and Moravian groups to establish an up-country culture. They were fundamentalist and Puritan in religion, dour and fiercely independent in personality, and raucous and frequently wild in action. They established a society that was raw, vigorous, crude, and marked by harsh individualism and a hard, grim way of life. As the nineteenth century advanced, this mountain culture remained relatively static; and its malcontents and adventurous ones, along with those from the Virginia Tidewater and the Carolina Low Country, moved steadily westward into a constantly retreating frontier. Finally, in the 1840's and later, near the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, a third South began to be established, modeled on an imperfect dream of the older coastal social order but having much of the harshness and the violent individualism of the mountain men.

Along the coast line, the English culture of the early settlers had flourished in great plantations and in port cities and towns. But the glories of these centers and their way of life belonged to the eighteenth century; by the beginning of the nineteenth, the rush of economic forces was sweeping away former power, for the economy of the coastal regions underwent steady attrition through the first half of the century. Originally resting on rich money bases of tobacco, indigo, and rice, the Tidewater and the Low Country never adjusted successfully to the burgeoning cultivation of cotton that followed the invention of the cotton gin. Furthermore, cotton is a plant that depletes the soil rapidly and demands large numbers of inexpensive laborers—factors that made the “cotton kingdom” an entity that tended to follow the western movement of the frontier and to generate increasing demands for slave labor. Charleston, South Carolina, in the eighteenth century had been a major American seaport and boasted a society of almost European urbanity. But it was soon surpassed in growth in the nineteenth century as it saw the tide of business move slowly but steadily to the middle Atlantic ports and New Orleans become the cotton port. Charleston citizens, like those of most of the southern seaports, concocted grand schemes for luring back trade and re-establishing its fading supremacy. They built railroads—the first steam locomotive to pull a line of cars on a scheduled service was the “Best Friend,” operating out of Charleston in 1830. They dreamed of railway tunnels through the Blue Ridge mountains to link the Mississippi valley to their port. But none of these ventures succeeded in achieving for the Atlantic coast the supremacy it had once enjoyed. Some of its citizens became noted agronomists, urging scientific farming as a means of overcoming soil depletion. Notable among them was Edmund Ruffin, whose Essay on Calcareous Manures (1832) was one of the most important books of the time.

Thus, by economic forces as well as by personal choices, the region between the mountains and the Mississippi became increasingly vital to the total life of the southern region, although the ideals and attitudes of the Atlantic coast continued to dominate much of the thoughts and the aspirations of the newly opened lands.

The life of the South was rural, regardless of which section of the region is considered. Even its cities, small though they were by national standards, were commercial centers for an agrarian society, for planters and merchants serving agricultural interests. In the eighteenth century, agrarianism was a philosophical doctrine resting on the arguments of the French physiocrats and espoused by men like Thomas Jefferson. In the nineteenth century, agrarianism became an article of political and economic faith as industrial capitalism dominated the New England and Middle Atlantic states. Manufacturing came to the South—such as William Gregg's cotton textile factory at Graniteville, South Carolina, in 1846—but it came very slowly and over great resistance. The region argued with passionate conviction that only an agricultural society could permit man his proper place in the scheme of things.

In a farming region, with few sizable population concentrations, the family, the homestead, and the plantation were the centers of intellectual and cultural as well as of physical life. In the urban centers, such as Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, there were few literary coteries, relatively little art and music, and no great libraries. Newspapers and agricultural magazines supplied much of the reading matter. Many and valiant efforts to establish magazines to serve the region were made, but most were doomed to failure. Some, such as the Southern Review (1828-1832), Simms's Southern and Western Magazine (1845), and Russell's Magazine (1857-1860), were relatively distinguished, but only The Southern Literary Messenger (1834-1864) was an artistic and commercial success for any substantial length of time. There were always regional book publishers, but their products were not widely distributed or read. Both the southern reader and writer depended on the great publishing centers of the North.

The growing cultivation of cotton, the fear generated by slave uprisings—the most famous being Nat Turner's Insurrection in 1831—and the increasing intensity of the abolition movement resulted in the South's steadily strengthening tendency to view itself as an embattled region. In the early years of the century it had, in the main, looked on Negro slavery as an evil economic necessity that would—and should—eventually pass away. In its vigorous defense of itself and its institutions, it came, however, to regard slavery as a positive good, divinely ordained and to be preserved at all costs. Thus, the South changed during these sixty-five years from being the cradle of democracy and the mother of presidents to disunion and a war for independence.

The literature of the ante-bellum South was thus the writing of an essentially rural section, devoid of major literary centers and actively defending itself against what it considered outside attack. The great profession of its citizens was law; its passion was public life; and its special genius was in politics. It delighted in open and public pleasures—the hunt, the race, the ball, the banquet—and cared little for the introspective calm of the study and could endure the odor of the midnight lamp only for short intervals. Whether we talk of coastal plain or mountain or frontier, these attitudes still prevailed by and large. For, with very few exceptions, in all three sections the writers were amateurs who regarded lightly their literary scribbling as the avocation of gentlemen, not seriously as the vocation of professionals. William Gilmore Simms, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Timrod were the only true professional writers among the ante-bellum South's men of letters, and each of them had the gravest difficulty in successfully maintaining a literary career.

The coastal plain dominated polite letters. From its inhabitants came essays, poems, tales, and novels, striving for grace and style or making political points through thinly veiled allegory. The essayists of the eighteenth century were models and Addisonian prose an ideal, although the ponderous review-essays of the British quarterlies were often imitated. Sir Walter Scott's novels were triumphant successes all over the nation in the 1820's and 1830's, but the South continued to import them by the railroad car load long after “The Wizard of the North” had yielded place to the great Victorian social novelists in the rest of the nation. Byron was the most admired of the nineteenth-century poets, although the seventeenth-century Cavalier singers had their following, and all the English Romantics fell on responsive ears, as did Tennyson.

The frontier, on the other hand, produced a radically different kind of writing, one which we have come in the twentieth century to place at a high premium but which in its own day was regarded as subliterary, even by most of those who produced it. It was a written form of an essentially oral literature, rich in language experiments, in dialect variants, and in the extravagant exploits of frontiersmen. Written primarily for the country newspaper and distributed by newspaper exchanges, the best of it found its way into William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a sporting weekly published in New York from 1831 to 1861, and there it found a national audience and a small fame. The frontier also attracted reporters from the more genteel coastal South, and these reporters sent back accounts of the amusing antics of the natives to the Richmond and Charleston magazines, as Joseph Glover Baldwin did to the Southern Literary Messenger.

Few writers attempted to combine these traditions. One of William Gilmore Simms's claims to importance in the literature of the region is that he did make such an effort. He wrote historical novels of the coastal settlement and the Revolution, essays in the tradition of the British quarterlies, poetry in great quantity, and histories and biographies—all in the tradition of polite letters. But he also wrote tales and romances of the southern border country, of life on the troubled frontier, of its dangers, its villains, its traveling repertory companies, and its outlaws. In his own time, critics both northern and southern were offended by the directness and raw vigor of Simms's pictures of low and border life, and, as Poe did, praised him when he retreated from this harsh theatre into the remote historical past.

Edgar Allan Poe appears a non-typical figure in the national letters of his time. At a time when most of the nation was deeply committed to a moralistic Platonism—“It is not metres but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,” Emerson said—Poe could review with unabashed enthusiasm the nearly mechanical steps by which a “rhythmical creation of beauty” came into being. He was a critic committed to the principles of analytical exegesis and Aristotelian judgment, and a writer of tales aimed at stimulating intense response rather than inculcating ideas. But, however much he was out of step with the national trends, he seems hardly a variant at all when judged within the southern setting from which he seems to have drawn many of his intellectual concepts and attitudes. Rather, he seems a genius who made art from attitudes and methods that in lesser hands had failed to achieve merit.

Henry Timrod was in many senses the Keats of the ante-bellum South. He was committed to poetry with a passionate devotion; he was weak in health; and he was a victim of disease at a young age. But his considerable lyric powers were devoted to the celebration of a new nation fated not to survive the war which was to have made it independent, and his best efforts in verse were laid upon the altar of the Confederacy and its soldiers. Thus, he was a victim of the South's aggressive defensiveness, and, with all his talent, survives as the gallant singer of a lost cause.

But the bulk of the writing was done by lawyers, planters, politicians, journalists. And these amateurs created the matrix in which the work of Simms, Poe, and Timrod must be fitted; and of the three only Poe was great enough artist to escape the strictures of that shaping mould. And these amateurs, by their attitudes toward the work they did, contributed as much to the general disregard of serious letters in the ante-bellum South as they did to its advancement. Despite some talent and a fair degree of accomplishment, southern writing before the Civil War fell victim to what Ellen Glasgow has called “a congenial hedonism [which] had established in the South a confederacy of the spirit.”