THIS BOOK IS THE FIRST VOLUME of a two-volume collection of Confederate Poets and Poems, and the second entry into a planned five-volume Southern poetry collection, The Land They Loved. The first book of the series was
Southern Poets and Poems, 1600-1860
, published in 2023.
Poetry conveys a kind of truth not found in other forms of human communication. The great William Gilmore Simms said that verse was necessary to understand the Confederate people in their historic struggle for independence. Southern verse, he wrote, was essential to knowing the opinions and ideas, the motives and actions of the Southern people.
And what a dedicated, skilled, and honourable struggle it was! Fashionable historians now treat everything favourable about the Southern Confederacy as a "Lost Cause Myth." They are wrong. Confederates were a learned and thoughtful people and studying these verses demonstrates that there is a great deal more to the Lost Cause than a Myth.