Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/320

 304 Poets of the Civil War II and the Gray and Lanier's The Tournament — ^both of them prophetic of a new national era. Not only was Browne's idea happy and well executed; his introduction and notes are invaluable. He established the fact that the author of Stone- wall Jackson's Way was Dr. J. W. Palmer. He printed in connection with the poems valuable letters as to the cir- cumstances under which were written My Maryland and The Conquered Banner. The volume as a whole was so marked by a careful critical judgment and good taste as to distinguish it from the hastily prepared anthologies by Southerners. Two books of similar nature are Eggleston's American War Ballads and Burton E. Stevenson's Poems oj American History, in both of which the poems are published in chronological order, and in Stevenson's book with the historical setting which interprets many of the individual poems. In later years selections from Southern writers by Miss Manly and Miss Clarke and Professors Trent, Kent, and Fulton, and biographi- cal sketches by Baskervill and Link, have brought the best poems and poets within the reach of a larger circle of students and readers. The Library of Southern Literature is a valuable mine of selections and biographical material. When one tries to make a general estimate of this war poetry as a whole, there are three standpoints from which it may be considered. Judged from the standpoint of absolute criticism, it affords another illustration of the contention that war produces a quantity of mediocre poetry but little of endur- ing worth. Pour or five poems at best have stood the win- nowing process of time and judicial criticism. Randall's My Maryland, Ticknor's Little Giffen of Tennessee, and Timrod's Ode on the Confederate dead in MagnoUa Cemetery might well be included in any anthology of lyric poetry, ancient or modem. If we consider the poems from the standpoint of either literary or social history, a larger number must be considered significant. They rightly find their place in such a collection as Stedman's American Anthology as affording material for the comprehensive survey of American poetry; or in the books of Stevenson and Browne, where the various stages of the Civil War are suggested in poems rather than in army orders, political tracts, or newspaper comment. When President Lincoln said at the end of the war that the Northern