William J. Grayson came to concentrate on writing only in the final decades of a long and varied career as lawyer, teacher, planter, legislator, government official, and member of Congress. Although the impetus for his most famous poem, The Hireling and the Slave (1854), was political, the poems he wrote in the later 1850s are primarily pastoral. He is usually seen as a prosodic dinosaur, an anachronistic Augustan couplet-monger in the age of American Romanticism. Like his friend Hugh Swinton Legaré, Grayson was by education and inclination a classicist, but the caricature of him as a glacial reactionary of narrow views is misleading. He never went abroad, but he was always in touch with English and Continental thought. In his final major writings, two biographies and an autobiography, Grayson looks both forward to the doubtful future of the American republic and backward to the Golden Age of his...