Paul Hamilton Hayne was the best-known southern poet and man of letters during the 1870s and 1880s. As the editor of two important antebellum magazines, the Southern Literary Gazette and Russell's Magazine, as a contributor to many important periodicals, both northern and southern, before and after the Civil War, and as an editorial writer/columnist in southern journals after the war, Hayne eventually became the chief southern spokesman on literary affairs after the death of William Gilmore Simms in 1870. His critical views, consequently, are sometimes related to his position as an unofficial laureate, though they are frequently less sectional than might be expected. On the whole, his opinions reflect a traditional and eclectic romanticism that nevertheless manages often to concern itself with contemporary writing and to express itself sometimes in a rather modern manner.

Hayne's first critical pronouncements appeared in connection with his editorial functions on the Southern...