Contemporary Southern Poetry. An Anthology

Gilbert Allen; Guy Owen; Mary C. Williams

doi:10.2307/3199330

Contemporary Southern Poetry. An Anthology

South Atlantic Review ◽

10.2307/3199330 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 115

Author(s):

Gilbert Allen ◽

Guy Owen ◽

Mary C. Williams

Keyword(s):

Southern Poetry

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Byron Herbert Reece (1917-1958) and the southern poetry tradition

Choice Reviews Online ◽

10.5860/choice.39-2052 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 39 (04) ◽

pp. 39-2052-39-2052

Keyword(s):

Southern Poetry

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Southern Poetry: Antebellum to Contemporary

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.301 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Claire Raymond

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Blind Spot ◽

The South ◽

Rural South ◽

History Of ◽

American Poets ◽

Southern Poetry ◽

History Of The South

Southern poetry embraces dichotomous elements: it contains poems lauding the Confederacy, and also poems deeply critical and mournful of the racist violence, oppression, and racist terrorism that characterize the region’s history. Yet a common thread runs through Southern poetry—attention to the land, the rural South as a character in its own right, and with that attention to the land a quality of haunting and being haunted by the history of the South: the violence of colonization, enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow. Twentieth-century poet Etheridge Knight, born in Mississippi, lyrically describes the earth of Mississippi merging with the graves of his ancestors, calling him home to a place where, as a black man, he is not safe. Nineteenth-century poet Sidney Lanier, born in Georgia and, like Knight, a man who had experienced imprisonment, shapes in his poetry a mythical country where trees and rivers and indigenous crops become forces superseding the human; but Lanier, a soldier for the Confederacy, does not mention enslavement in his poetry. In Southern poetry, this blind spot—the white Southern poet who does not see or reflect upon the racist violence of enslavement, Jim Crow, lynching—is often submerged into a poetry melancholic and obsessed with unnamable violence and loss, even as African American poets of the South often name this loss in terms of personal memory. Myth—of the aristocratic, agrarian South—in white Southern poetry, and memory—of personal risk and suffering—in African American Southern poetry, can be understood together as a common pull to write the land, albeit from different perspectives.

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