SOURCE: Smith, C. Alphonso. “Literature in the South.” In Southern Literary Studies, pp. 44-70. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1927.

In the following essay, originally delivered as an address in 1908, Smith surveys a number of enduring poems by minor pre-Civil War poets and analyzes the reasons for the lack of literary productiveness in the South before the war.

I should belie the feelings that are uppermost in my heart tonight if I did not at the outset express my sense of appreciation and privilege at being permitted to speak to this audience on so vital a theme as that which your partiality has assigned me. The spectacle of the American people trying to find and to phrase themselves in a national literature, scanning the pages of their history that they may interpret it in terms of distinctive beauty and suggestiveness, has always been to me one of rare and...