Synopsis

Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne (1882) is a complete edition that showcases Hayne's antebellum juvenile poetry, his war poems, and post-Civil War pieces published previously in Legends and Lyrics (1872) and The Mountain of the Lovers; With Poems of Nature and Tradition (1875). Featuring lyrical poems, sonnets, odes, and narrative verse, the collection testifies to Hayne's tremendous range as a poet. Across the body of his work, notable similarities in tone, form, and themes emerge. Sentimental and fervent in tenor, the poems tend to be rather personal and non-intellectual. Favoring iambic meters and regular rhyme, Hayne often follows ABAB or couplet rhyme schemes. Perhaps most striking is Hayne's thematic unity; the central premise of all the poems is love—of country, state, family, nature, God, and friends.