[In the following essay, Moore chronicles the correspondence of poet Paul Hamilton Hayne with author and critic James Maurice Thompson, particularly as their writing touches upon the theme of postwar reconciliation between North and South.]

Paul Hamilton Hayne belonged to a prominent Carolina family, several members of which had made important contributions to the history of the state. One of these, Robert Y. Hayne, governor, senator, and proponent of Nullification, was Paul Hayne's uncle and guardian after the untimely death of Paul Hamilton Hayne, Sr. in 1831. Born in 1830 in the year of the great debate in the Senate in which his uncle took a leading part and reared in Charleston, educated in Christopher Cotes's Classical School and at the College of Charleston, Hayne read law with James Louis Petigru, but early in his twenties he began contributing to the Southern Literary Messenger, Graham's Magazine, and other periodicals; and in the 1850's he published three slim volumes of poetry while editing the Southern Literary Gazette and Russell's Magazine. When war came in 1861, he fervently supported states' rights and the Confederacy, though chronic illness and poor health in general limited him to a four-month tour of active duty as aide-de-camp to Governor Francis Pickens. After 1862 he contributed to the cause with his pen, but he never matched the achievement of his friend Henry Timrod as a war poet. Ruined financially by the war and depressed in mind and spirit, Hayne acquired a small tract of land near Augusta, Georgia, and moved there with his family in 1866. At Copse Hill, as he later called it, he resolved to devote his energies to literature, and he spent the last twenty years of his life contributing verse and prose to magazines and newspapers and bringing out three more volumes of poetry: Legends and Lyrics (1872); The Mountain of the Lovers: With Poems of Nature and Tradition (1875); and Poems, Complete Edition (1882).

After the death of William Gilmore Simms in 1870 and the publication of Legends and Lyrics in 1872, Hayne was considered by many throughout the country as the poet laureate of the South, the “representative” Southern poet and man of letters, and the chief Southern literary spokesman to both regional and national audiences.¹ He took himself seriously in this role and few political or cultural occasions passed without some poetic comment or tribute from his pen. His contemporaries—Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Bryant, Whittier, Howells, and Lanier, among them, to say nothing of Britishers like Jean Ingelow, Philip Bourke Marston, R. D. Blackmore, and Wilkie Collins—thought well of him and his poetry. Tennyson himself praised Hayne's poems in several instances; Longfellow told a friend in 1881 that Hayne was “now the poet of America”; and Whittier wrote on Hayne's death in 1886 that he was assured a place in the “Valhalla of the country.” Moreover, two of the chief American critics of the period, E. P. Whipple and E. C. Stedman, commended Hayne's work frequently and generously. Stedman's observations on the last collection of Hayne's poems are characteristic: “On the whole,” he wrote in December, 1882, “your ‘Complete Edition’ is a beautiful success—in every way such a voucher & witness as an American poet may be proud to bring forward. There is something in dimensions, … & one now sees … how important and genuine your life-song has been.”²

James Maurice Thompson (1844-1901) also thought highly of Hayne's poems and expressed his opinions in three reviews and numerous letters. A poet and critic half a generation younger than Hayne, Thompson was a native of Indiana, though he had been reared in northwest Georgia, had served honorably in the Confederate army, and had contributed verse and prose to Southern periodicals immediately after the war. As contributors to Scott's Monthly, a Georgia magazine, Thompson and Hayne had exchanged letters in the late sixties but had not met in person. In 1874 they renewed their correspondence, and Thompson, who had returned to Indiana in 1868 to become a successful lawyer and civil engineer, reviewed very favorably Hayne's Legends and Lyrics in the Indianapolis Journal for November 14, 1874.³

Hayne's first letter is characteristic of his interest in promoting Southern writers and writing. After referring on May 20 to the years which had intervened since their last intercourse, he remarks:

I have not … heard from you personally; but in another way, I have—in common with the Literary world—heard from you very pleasantly indeed.

Really, Sir, I must be allowed, as one of the very few Southerners devoted like yourself, to letters, to congratulate you upon the success of your poems; especially those published in ‘The Atlantic Monthly.’ I am not alone in the admiration of these pieces. Last summer while travelling thro N. England, renewing old & making new acquaintances, I heard your verses … and other similar performances, spoken of in high terms, by men whose commendation is more than ordinary fame. …

I write these things from no design to flatter (men of any sense or delicacy don't insult each other in that way), but because the victor is worthy the Crown; and the So[uthern] man who succeeds in getting a foothold among the acknowledged art-representatives of the North has achieved a feat deserving recognition, especially from his own brothers. And yet, I'll wager a good deal that the note you are now reading is the first communication of the sort you have recd from any So source! It maddens me sometimes to think of the supineness and intellectual toadyism of our own People. …⁴

At this point Hayne returns to the recent visit he had made to the North and mentions briefly some of the literary people—Longfellow, Holmes, and Howells, among them—whose “converse” he had enjoyed. Then he concludes: “Luckily you have made literature simply your ‘staff,’ as Scott called it, & not your sole support; for even in the West & North, mere writing could hardly support one, unless a vein of immense Popularity were struck; and popularity I rather distrust, don't you? Some tremendous public favorites in this country are in point of the higher art, just nowhere!”

Thompson's reply of May 23 was equally genial, and the way was prepared for a warm but occasionally stormy friendship and correspondence and for Hayne to give Thompson in 1881 materials for a biography to be published later, a matter which led to an argument between Mrs. Hayne and Thompson in 1887, well over a year after Hayne's death.

The exchange of letters during the 1870's, however, was completely cordial. Hayne, for example, liked Thompson's poems, consistently praised them, and as early as October, 1874, urged him to collect them. Thompson, in turn, lauded Hayne's verse, and even when, in 1875, Thompson ventured a few adverse comments in a generally favorable review of Hayne's The Mountain of the Lovers, Hayne immediately responded: “This little breeze of a discussion, Dear Thompson, originating in a single paragraph of your subtle & scholarly critique has blown itself clear away. … But, oh Thompson … how could you think, nay, dream for the fraction of a second, that you had ‘lost me by it’? say, rather, ‘gained’ me, for sincerity & candour are the rarest qualities nowadays in criticism; and these high qualities in you, none, I venture to observe, could appreciate more profoundly than I! ‘Send that review to the deuce!!’ Excuse me: I shall cherish it, on the contrary, among my valuable literary treasures.”

In the following year, Thompson endeared himself even more when he wrote that he had heard “indirectly” that Hayne was “not only suffering from disease but also from actual want. Is this true?” he asked. “If it is, I wish you to let me know it at once that I may go to work in your behalf. You shall not suffer if I know it. Do not allow false pride to keep back the whole, the naked truth. You must not shut yourself out from the help of your friends all over the country.”⁵

Instead of being offended, Hayne was touched and on January 26, 1876, replied accordingly:

There are some feelings, my Dear Thompson, too deep & sacred to be adequately expressed in words. Our poor mortal language shrinks lamely away in the effort to embody them; & becomes dwarfed & belittled in the presence of such great emotions.

The truth of this, has been practically brought home to my mind by your letter. … What can I say of the noble unselfishness, the profound, affectionate solicitude displayed by you towards myself at a time when your very heart-strings must be rent asunder by one of the gravest of afflictions? [Thompson's first son had died nine days before he wrote Hayne.] Only this! May God cease to remember me in my utmost need, if ever I forget your delicate Christian friendship, your pure unstudied sympathy on this occasion!

The terms of your communication impose candor upon me as a duty; and therefore, let me say that if the question you ask therein had been asked some years earlier, (i.e.) at any period covered by the two years immediately succeeding the war, I would have been forced to reply that Starvation was constantly staring us in the face!

But now, (thank Heaven!), altho our circumstances are still of the humblest sort; we at least have eno' to eat, and enough to drink, & enough wherewithal to clothe ourselves decently. By residing in the Pine Woods, afar from any Municipality, with its enormous Taxation and daily unavoidable expenses; we merely manage to get on; yet, this ‘mere getting on’ is a matter for sincere thanksgiving.

The report of my complete destitution possibly originated in the knowledge of some that while at the North, in 1873, and smitten by sickness, I had to borrow money to convey myself & son homeward; and that general impecuniosity and a continuance of ill health since, have prevented me from cancelling such obligations.

And here I am led to answer another query of yours. Alack! it is only too true, the report of my serious illness. During 3 months just elapsed, I have had from 12 to 15 hemorrhages, probably from the right lung, and tho I've not been much thinned, the nerves are shattered to pieces; and regular literary labor has become an impossibility.

Nevertheless, a few hundreds of income, derived from the fragments of a once handsome fortune, stand between us and destitution, so that there is really no need of the assistance you so generously hinted at, and which, under certain circumstances, I would not hesitate gratefully to accept.

I write with difficulty, … but must not close without assuring you of the ineffable sorrow and sympathy I feel on account of your recent loss. …

My wife, mother, boy (all my little household) unite with me in sending you grateful thanks for your unexampled kindness; and sincere, heartfelt sympathy in your sad bereavement. …

The two friends, of course, did not always confine themselves to personal matters. They frequently took up other topics, especially those of a literary or political nature. Each regularly referred to his own creative work and to that of his friends. Both knew Howells, for example, though their views of him differed on occasion. Early in the seventies Howells gave a cordial reception in the Atlantic to the verse of both men, but later in the decade Hayne seldom appeared in the magazine, and he was disgruntled: “Messer Howells,” he wrote on November 22, 1876, “has cut me ‘for good’. … I must have done something to offend H. or his amour propre!” Thompson defended Howells and continued to do so for years, since Howells kept accepting some of his verse and in 1883 wrote a generous review of his first collection, Songs of Fair Weather.

From time to time the older poets were discussed. William F. Gill's life of Poe appeared in 1877, and Gill's treatment of the Poe-Griswold relationship provided material for several letters in that year. When Thompson urged Hayne to remember that Rufus W. Griswold was dead and should not therefore be castigated for his editing of Poe's life and work, Hayne replied on October 10: “Don't tell me that such a wretch, because of the mere ‘accident of death,’ deserves consideration, tenderness, or mercy!” Then, on the basis of information which he thought established Griswold's “infamy” “beyond the shadow of a doubt,” Hayne characterizes Griswold as a “malicious serpent” who left his “loathsome trail” over “female innocence and purity.” Gill, he concludes, “acquainted with the facts I have alluded to, felt them naturally re-act upon him in his estimate of Griswold's connection with Poe. So far as it goes, his case versus the former, appears to me a very powerful one. And, upon my soul! I don't see how, with the lights before him, he could have written differently. Of course, as a general principle, what you say concerning the ‘meanness’ of assaulting the Dead, is beyond all dispute; but let me repeat that exceptional Cases exist, to which the charitable Rule applies not. G's case is one of these.”

Late in 1877 Thompson accepted an invitation to visit Copse Hill during the Christmas season, but circumstances prevented and Hayne expressed his disappointment on February 8, 1878:

May the Devil confound such luck! Aye! And you have lost something too!

Everything was prepared to give you a homely but honest welcome …, [including] Charles Lamb's delectable roast-pig and a ‘garnish’ of wild ducks every day. … Also, did I not in the expansion of soul … naturally resulting from the prospect of your visit, send to a ‘canny Scots’ friend of mine in Savannah, and make him transmit a half gallon of Scotch whiskey (real ‘Highland dew,’ my lad!), and a half gallon of Irish do, the perfume whereof, so struck a certain Presbyterian Parson's nostrils (who casually dropped in about Xmas to our ‘pot luck’) that I persuaded his Reverence to try a drop, and then another drop, until his eyes twinkled and his heart grew soft; & the stern Theological views of a quarter of a Century melted like snow drifts under the warm sun-like beguilements of Bacchus!!

Evidently, when he took his departure, he had eschewed Calvin; and [had] rather begun to imagine that Origen was the foremost of the ancient Fathers! As for St. Augustine, he had fallen below zero in the Rev. Mr's estimation!! And all (mark you!) the result of a little judicious administration of what our friends of the Green Isle denominate ‘the Crature’! Wonderful!!

In the long run, the visit was not missed but merely postponed, and the Thompsons spent several days with the Haynes in November, 1881. A month later Thompson was still remembering the “little family circle” at Copse Hill and the “charming flavor of Mrs. Hayne's rice-bread and coffee.” But the first real test of the bond of friendship lay just ahead, for Thompson's novel, A Tallahassee Girl, appeared in the following spring, and when Hayne candidly criticized certain aspects of it, the friendship was threatened momentarily.

Hayne's comments are contained in a letter of April 28, 1882:

Is it needful to observe how delighted we are to hear of the success of your book?

… I do not object (as you seem half disposed to think I might) to the political position assumed in it. On the contrary, all things considered, it seems to me fair enough. You have taken … the medium course … which if the safest is also often the most truthful. Neither Section is likely to quarrel with your views. …

Artistically, what pleases us (i.e., my wife & I), especially, … is the poetical & graphic word-painting of landscaping and localities. The quaint, quiet out-of-the-world old Town and its environs, so picturesque, peculiar & romantic, are made (under the glamour of your touch) vividly present to the ‘mind's-eye’; & thus scenes not actually viewed, nevertheless appear subjectively before us, now & then, with startling effect. …

Don't be vexed with me, if I frankly say that in construction & characterization I cannot think the novel equals the delicate vraisemblance of its description of what Painters would call ‘still life.’ Parts of the story strike me as a trifle abrupt; the Chapters … not being compactly ‘dove-tailed.’

And the characterization is too sketchy in certain cases (lacking the needful elaboration of detail, & completeness of coloring), while in others (me judice) there is some inconsistency, if not contradiction.

Hayne thereupon challenges Thompson's handling of the main Southern characters. The chief male, an aristocrat who is supposed to represent many of the best qualities of both the old and the new South, Hayne faults on the basis of certain actions which he considers not true-to-life, and he characterizes the heroine as “charming” but “vague” and “a trifle insipid.” He balances the account with praise for the Negro characters and patois, singles out a particular scene for special commendation, and concludes: “Surely there are noble elements in this work, which abundantly account for its success; a success let me repeat which is most gratifying to us all here. As for my candour upon what (mistakenly perhaps) appears to me its faults, am I not paying you the highest compliment by such frankness? To a mere acquaintance, one might be conventional & reticent, if not actually insincere—but to a Friend & Brother; one should open both heart & mind.”

Thompson's rejoinder followed immediately. On May 1 he defended himself against Hayne's “strictures” by describing them as “a tirade against my book” and by generally taking Hayne's criticism as being politically oriented rather than being based on literary principles.⁶ Hayne had made a “great mistake” in moving to Copse Hill and was, Thompson deduced, isolated and therefore not adequately in touch with the times. Consequently he was in no position to judge the transition period described and dealt with in the novel.

Hayne was “pained” by such a response and forthrightly took up both the political and literary charges in a letter of May 8.⁷ “I am not piqued,” he asserted, “but I am mortified, hurt, & not a little indignant that the first words of dispraise I have ever used towards any work of yours should have been read in so strange, & unworthy a spirit.”

Thompson's reply was again swift, but the tenor of his note of May 10 is quite different from that of May 1:

You have (in your love for me as I well know) mistaken and misapplied my whole letter. How sorry I am! I intended that letter in the lightest and least serious vein.

Heavens, Hayne, if it has given you a pang I shall never forgive myself. What is a book and all it can fetch compared to such friendship, such sweet affection as you have always shown me? I solemnly assure you that nothing in your strictures on ‘A T G’ even so much as ‘ruffled my temper’ to say nothing about affecting my love for you. Set it down in the book of your heart that I have never doubted your sincerity and have never willfully uttered a word to jar on your sensitive and generous nature; for Hayne I hold you very dear.⁸

Two days later Thompson explained more fully:

In a moment of temporary resentment I wrote things which no doubt seemed to mean more than I intended. I suppose, too, that I at the time exaggerated some things in what you said about my book … !

But all this is trash. What is this or that to the kind, true heart of my friend! I am a wolf to have snarled at you. …

The truth is I had laid great store by having you thoroughly like my book. I should have liked your praise more than that of many a professional critic who has praised it. Wherefore, I suppose, my disappointment was all the keener when you chose unfortunate words like “insipid' and phrases implying my lack of knowledge where I knew myself at home. After all, why should a little passage of argument and sharp phrases make any permanent wound?

Neither of us would wound the other. … I am sorry you took my letter so seriously. It was not intended to be personal or insulting. Far from it. Let's burn it.⁹

The quarrel thus ended as quickly as it had begun, the contentious parties cooled off, and the friendship remained unbroken, though the main point at issue—the interpretation of the postwar South—was not resolved. Thompson's review of Hayne's next book, for example, was quite laudatory, but he also wrote a letter soon afterwards in which he advised against Hayne's unreconstructed political views.

In his notice of Hayne's Complete Edition for the Chicago Times, March 4, 1883, Thompson characterized Hayne as a “lyrist of no uncertain power. At many points,” he continues, Hayne “is not surpassed by any American poet.” Then he ranks Hayne, along with Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier, as one of the four best living poets in America. “Viewed purely as an artist in poetry Hayne,” he holds, “is in every way worthy a place in this four.” But, in a letter written eleven days later, Thompson cautions his friend:

… your Southern hereditament—the cramping limitations of an unfortunate sectional bias which is rooted in disaster, has, in certain ways, hurt your flight, which otherwise would be a mighty one. It has been mighty anyway. You are just in your prime. Your very latest work is your best. I expect to see you assert yourself thoroughly and take the seat that is kept vacant for you.

… I hope you will not injure your growing influence by any more bitter war-poems. I am in a position to know that such writings will retard and hinder your just recognition as a National poet. You must not permit yourself to become sectional or local, nor must you be pars temporis acti. Look ahead. Stand by the Nation and the world. Forget, as a poet, that there ever was a so-called Confederacy. A poet must have wide vision, and you have. You are a noble poet, and I wish to see you take your true place.¹⁰

Shortly thereafter, the friendship sustained another strain, for on August 30, 1883, Hayne had to admit to Thompson that he could not “honestly declare” that he liked Thompson's current novel, His Second Campaign (1883), an even more critical treatment of the postwar South than A Tallahassee Girl, and the correspondence as we now have it ends with this letter. Moreover, for reasons apparently quite inadvertent, Hayne never received his promised copy of Thompson's first collection of poems, Songs of Fair Weather, when it was published in the fall of 1883. Hayne was puzzled by this failure in communication since he had always praised his friend's verse and had practically invited himself to review the book. Though the letters stop here, there is some evidence to suggest that the two writers were not irreparably estranged.

After Hayne's death in 1886, however, Mrs. Hayne sought to persuade Thompson to return certain biographical materials Hayne had given him in 1881. The correspondence which ensued was based on a misunderstanding about whether Thompson had the right to publish a “posthumous biography” of the Southern laureate.¹¹ Consequently, he did not write a lengthy study, but he did compose three articles in which his opinion of Hayne's poetry and stature changes substantially. In his first essay, for example, he begins to modify his views. Hayne, he says in the American Magazine for November, 1887, is “a name not to be numbered with the great, but it is a name that will live a long while. The man was a typical Southerner of the old school, and he was a poet also of the old school. … Such a poet as Hayne set himself too high for the popular taste, and yet not high enough to be accounted one of the great.”

A year later, after an exchange of communications with Mrs. Hayne, Thompson went further: Hayne, he asserted in Literature on September 22, 1888,

is a name honorable and honored in the list of minor American poets. We are too near him yet to assign his work to its place with exactitude; but it is quite safe to say that the niche will not be a low one. … Even now his verse stands alone in our letters, a monument of solitary, peculiar significance. Not that any of it is of great value simply as poetry; for all of its stronger notes had been sounded long before by the Elizabethan bards; but it has the force of competent and convincing evidence in the judgment of the critic and the historian, as an authentic badge of the civilization out of which it grew.

Thirteen years later in his final estimate of Hayne, Thompson brought together from his previous essays some of his most telling points against Hayne. “Critics,” he remarked in The Critic for November, 1901,

may easily differ about the value of [Hayne's] works; but that they have the distinction of adequacy as negatives from which a curious panorama, true to facts yet false to life, might be printed, no accurate thinker can doubt. To read them now is like rolling time back, a crackling parchment, to an almost forgotten economy and to a faded, if not wholly departed, state of popular taste.

Hayne's literary life … should be embodied in our history. It was important, no matter what may be the final word of criticism regarding his writings. He stood for the best and farthest reach of art permissible under the régime of slavery. His was the voice best modulated to the ear of his people and most thoroughly trained to fill the measure set by narrow and difficult limitations. …

It is not adverse criticism of the Old South to say that slavery, the most romantic, picturesque, and artistically available feature of its political, religious, social, and domestic life, could not, under the very nature of things, be freely discussed pro et con. Such discussion meant inevitable revolt and massacre; at least so it appeared. The bottom fact was that an unnatural state of civilization forced art to be unnatural. There was an iron limit within which the poet must go his singing rounds. Nor does it imply even the least condemnation of Hayne; rather quite the contrary, when we recognize his all but perfect self-adaptation to the rôle imposed by his strange environment. …

The body of Hayne's poetical works is full of the quality temporis acti; it reeks with sweets peculiarly Southern and out of date. If poetry is, as Matthew Arnold said, the criticism of life, here we have a valuable exposition of what old slavery days injected into the substance of living. The historian must honor it, and the student of American literature must give it due heed. Here the mocking-bird sings, here sough the dusky pines, here conservatism draws about it the robe of Wordsworth's time and walks in the circle of bygone enchantments.

… with Hayne [indeed] … came … the close of an era.

Much of Thompson's later criticism of Hayne the poet is apt enough, though not always for the right reasons. Hayne, for instance, was not necessarily inhibited by slavery or the old regime. His verse frequently suffers from some of the same weaknesses and limitations of that written in the same period by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, George Henry Boker, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor, all Northern bards whose work was hardly influenced by slavery or the antebellum South. These poets generally accepted British poetic traditions and American modifications of them, and few of them, with the possible exception of Stedman, dreamed that the fundamental changes being wrought by Whitman and Emily Dickinson would alter or even one day supplant the conventions they cherished and honored in theory and practice.¹²

Nor was Hayne, as a defender of the Old South, merely a bitter old fogey sitting on his front stoop hurling philippics at a later generation which held sacred few things that he loved or treasured. He was disheartened by what he interpreted as signs of a grasping materialism in his region, and he was disgusted by those who appeared willing to forget or ignore the past and to accommodate their views to an explanation of it which condemned everything the Old South had stood for. Southerners like George Washington Cable, for example, were in his opinion “renegades” and “traitors” to the South. Henry Grady was only slightly less suspect for embracing certain Yankee economic and political notions in promoting the so-called New South; and Thompson himself, after the publication of A Tallahassee Girl and His Second Campaign, seemed to Hayne to be infected with a similar virus.

Notwithstanding these convictions, Hayne was a pioneer in advancing the cause of cultural reconciliation between the sections, and he worked for many years to bring about better relations among literary people. He was not opposed to new ideas and developments in agriculture, industry, or literature so long as they assumed a proper relationship to the living tradition of the field involved. He was indeed a cavalier and perhaps, as Thompson observed, the “last” one, but he never considered everything lost, nor did he ever really give up hope that the best qualities of the old regime—its customs and manners, its standards of loyalty and honor, and its sense of noblesse oblige—would not eventually prevail even in a crass new day.

Certainly Hayne continued to trust Thompson's critical opinions of his poetry and to have sufficient faith in them to rely upon Thompson to perpetuate his name and reputation after his death. And Thompson's own reputation grew. In 1889 he became literary editor of The Independent, a post he held until his death in 1901. But, even so, Hayne's judgment in this matter was not sound, for his political differences with Thompson might well have suggested to him some of the lines Thompson's subsequent criticism would take; moreover, such criticism presumably played a part in the decline of Hayne's reputation. Indeed, in some ways, Hayne's choice of Thompson, for reasons not entirely dissimilar, was about as unwise as Poe's selection of Griswold had turned out to be over three decades earlier, though it does not seem likely that Thompson set out deliberately to blacken Hayne's character or to detract from his standing. Still, Thompson's criticism hardly contributed to maintaining or increasing his old friend's literary stature at a time when a strong push from such a nationally known critic as Thompson was then might have helped momentarily at least to keep Hayne's name and poetic fame green in the public's memory. Whatever the outcome—and Hayne's reputation declined substantially in the twentieth century—the Hayne-Thompson relationship is a fascinating revelation of the impingement of post-bellum politics upon the literary views and upon the friendship of two temporarily prominent writers whose relations might otherwise have been of little interest to posterity.

Notes

1. See Rayburn S. Moore, “Paul Hamilton Hayne,” Georgia Review, 20 (Spring, 1968), 106-24 and Paul Hamilton Hayne (New York, 1972).

2. The manuscript is in the Hayne papers, Perkins Library, Duke University. Hereinafter cited as HP, DU. I am grateful to Dr. Mattie Russell, Curator of Manuscripts, for graciously giving me access to these papers and allowing me to quote from them.

3. For a full account of Thompson's life and work, see Otis B. Wheeler, The Literary Career of Maurice Thompson (Baton Rouge, La., 1965).

4. Paul Hamilton Hayne Manuscripts, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. I am particularly grateful to Mr. E. L. Inabinett, Librarian, for notifying me that the South Caroliniana Library had acquired part of Hayne's correspondence with Thompson and for inviting me to use the letters as a basis for the annual address to the South Caroliniana Society. This essay is a slightly altered version of the address delivered in Columbia, South Carolina, on May 5, 1972. All subsequent references to manuscripts, unless otherwise designated, are to those in the South Caroliniana Library.

5. HP, DU.

6. HP, DU.

7. The letter itself is not readily available, but a working draft is in HP, DU.

8. HP, DU.

9. HP, DU.

10. HP, DU. Thompson's last remarks are directed against seventeen war poems which Hayne had included in his collected edition, but since, as Hayne hastened to point out, the edition was supposed to be “complete,” Hayne did not see how he could fail to include the most representative of these poems; he certainly excluded several of a more forthright nature.

11. Part of this exchange of letters is in HP, DU, as are clippings of Thompson's three articles on Hayne.

12. For a fuller statement of this view, see Rayburn S. Moore, “Hayne the Poet: A New Look,” South Carolina Review, 2 (November, 1969), 11-13.