A Southern Poetry Sampler
When I See That Flag Flying by John Parker When I see that flag flying I see my people dying Defending their land From its invasion. When I see that flag waving I feel my… »
The South’s Gifts to Posterity
What does the South have to offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization? In 1939, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to this question in his book The South to… »
The War Between the Dreams
Old slave and planter graves a flight apart For thrushes eating seeds of grass and yew, The unmarked plots and plots with dates and names Too weatherworn to trace and know in stone, Bones sinking… »
Allen Tate’s Confederate Ode: Who are the Living and the Dead?
Then Lytle asked: Who are the dead? Who are the living and the dead? Allen Tate, “The Oath” Over the decades since its first publication in 1927 Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” has… »
On Ballylee: The Enduring Legacy of Our Fathers’ Fields
A retrospective review of Our Fathers’ Fields: A Southern Story (University of South Carolina Press, 1998) by James Everett Kibler, Jr. On June 7, 1998, I opened a copy of The State newspaper from Columbia,… »
Conan the Southerner?
“Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon… »
In Memory of Andrew Lytle (1902-1995)
The poem was written shortly after Mr. Lytle’s death in 1995. I intended it to be part of an expanded edition of Poems from Scorched Earth, thus continuing the meditation on fire–in both its destructive… »
Loosiana Poets
A review of Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide, (U. Press of Mississippi, 2019) by Catharine Savage Brosman and Olivia McNeely Pass. The poet and the scholar are reportedly different sorts of people. Rarely do you… »
Memorial Day
Noblest of martyrs in a glorious fight! Ye died to save the cause of Truth and Right. And though your banner beams no more on high, Not vainly did it wave or did ye die!… »
Ode to the Confederate Dead
Row after row with strict impunityThe headstones yield their names to the element,The wind whirrs without recollection;In the riven troughs the splayed leavesPile up, of nature the casual sacramentTo the seasonal eternity of death;Then driven… »
