The Southern muse; Confederate war poetry during the Civil War
Date
1973
Authors
McIntyre, John Stuart
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Abstract
This thesis is a study of Confederate war poetry, researched in the files of nine Southern newspapers from 1861-1865. The poetry divides into three categories each of which corresponds to a different phase of the war, and it is my argument that through these three phases a change in Southern society can be traced. Beginning with the "Old South", which on the one hand proudly claimed to be a cultivated gracious "cavalier" civilization and on the other was tormented by guilt over the evil of slavery, the thesis follows the attitudes of the Southern people as they develop during the conflict. It illustrates that early Southern enthusiasm changed first to determination, then to despair, and finally to nostalgia, until at the end of the war a new society, the " New South" emerged. The thesis shows that through the war the Old Southern way of life was destroyed along with the institution of slavery, and that these changes transformed the South. The thesis argues that before the war the South had been gay, but guilty, while after the war the South was serious but free of guilt. Moreover the thesis concludes that, freed of guilt, the New South was able to develop an idealized picture of its past which gave them identity and unity in the postwar world.