Since Henry Timrod's output before the Civil War was limited to verse sufficient only for a single volume--published in December 1859--his literary reputation at the time was modest. The political activities surrounding the formation of a new nation and the impact of the war itself aroused Timrod's poetic imagination, however, and he quickly became widely known as the literary spokesman and eventually as the so-called poet laureate of the Confederacy, an unofficial title he has retained ever since. After the war, poor health associated with the complications of tuberculosis and abject poverty related to political and social conditions in South Carolina during Reconstruction made it impossible for Timrod to fulfill the promise or equal the achievement of his wartime performance, and he died in 1867, two months before his thirty-ninth birthday.

Henry Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 8 December 1828 to Thyrza Prince and William Henry Timrod, a...