Paul Hamilton Hayne was widely known and characterized in the 1870s and 1880s as the "poet laureate of the South," and with the death of William Gilmore Simms in 1870 he quickly became the recognized literary spokesman of the region, a position he maintained throughout the rest of his life, despite Sidney Lanier's brief prominence from 1875 to 1881. After Hayne's death, his reputation declined rapidly and did not begin to recover until the post-World War II period, when scholars and critics gradually reevaluated his work and concluded that he was chiefly important for his contributions as a correspondent and man of letters and, secondarily, as a poet.

Hayne was born in Charleston on 1 January 1830, the son of Paul Hamilton and Emily McElhenny Hayne and a scion of one of the most distinguished families in South Carolina. Colonel Isaac Hayne, a Revolutionary patriot executed by the British, was a collateral kinsman...