James Mathewes Legaré was born into a prominent family in a city--Charleston, South Carolina--where birth has always been a major consideration, but his attitude toward that advantage, as toward much about his native city, was always ambivalent. Although there was a certain stature accorded to any member of the Legaré (pronounced luh-gree) family, the branch to which this poet belonged was the least prosperous and least well-connected one. James Legaré was fifth in descent from the original Huguenot immigrant. As his own full name and that of his father's third cousin, Attorney General Hugh Swinton Legaré, indicate, after five or six generations in the United States the French blood had been much diluted; indeed, all of Legaré's direct male ancestors after the immigrant Solomon L'Egaré had married women of English descent.

The poet's father, John Doughty Legaré, married his second...