240 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900and movement, reflecting Lanier’s interest in prosody – in 1880, he published an
influential work on The Science of English Verse. It varies just as widely in terms of
genre and tone. There are, for example, accomplished polemical and satirical and
dialect pieces, such as “Thar’s more in the Man Than Thar is in the Land” (1877) and
“Jones’s Private Argument” (1877). There are also major pieces that follow the
tradition of, say, “Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth, in combining landscape
portraiture with reflection and meditation: like “Corn” (1877) and “The Marshes of
Glynn” (1877). What links them, above all, is Lanier’s belief in the redemptive power
of the land: the conviction that the salvation of his region, and indeed his nation, lay
in a return to the pieties of hearth and home, the self-reliant smallholding. “The
New South,” Lanier wrote in an essay, “means small farming.” “The only thing to do,”
declares a character called Jones in “Jones’s Private Argument,” “Is, eat no meat that’s
boughten: / But tear up every I.O.U. / And plant all corn and swear for true / To quit
a-raisin’ cotton!” Lanier was critical of both the dependence on one crop, cotton, that
he felt had destroyed the Old South and still weakened the New, and the growth of
a more complex, industrial society dependent on trade and capital. “Trade, Trade,
Trade,” Lanier wrote to a friend, “pah, are we not all sick! A man cannot walk down
a green valley of woods, in these days, without unawares getting his mouth and nose
and eyes covered with some web or other that Trade has stretched across, to catch
some grain or other.” True to this conviction, in a poem like “The Marshes of Glynn”
he develops a contrast between the blessings of the rural life and the “terror and
shrinking and dreary unbearable pain” of other forms of existence. Similarly, in
“Corn” he moves from a richly atmospheric description of nature in all its primitive
abundance, through a celebration of the culture of the independent farm and “the
happy lot” of “the home-fond heart,” to a critical assault on commercial farming and
commerce in general. For Lanier, the choice for the South, and for America, was
simple. On the one hand, as he put it in “Corn,” was the “mild content” of being a
“steadfast dweller on the same spot,” the pleasant mediocrity of a family support-
ing itself on its own land. On the other, was a culture governed by the instabilities
of exchange: where “flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand / Of trade, for ever
rise and fall / With alternation whimsical.” Despite all the evidence to the contrary,
he still believed that the choice had not been made, for his nation as well as his
region, and he managed to convince himself that, even now, “antique sinew” and
“modern art,” old aptitudes and new tools, could be combined to recapture the
Jeffersonian dream.
Lanier was unusual among those writers concerned with the fate of the South in
that he did anticipate a redemptive future. Timrod was, in this instance, more typical
in that he dwelled, with an appropriate sense of pathos, on the past and loss. Writers
such as Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), James Lane Allen (1849–1925), and
Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) drew a romantic portrait of the antebellum South
that presented it as a gracious, feudal civilization, peopled by stereotypes of white
male nobility and white female decorum and beauty, humble black retainers notable
for their simplicity and devotion to their “old massa and missis,” and field hands
singing melodiously as they worked. There was an element of self-consciousness inGGray_c03.indd 240ray_c 03 .indd 240 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM