SOURCE: “Hayne the Poet: A New Look,” in South Carolina Review, Vol. II, November, 1969, pp. 4‐13.

In the following essay, Moore defends the quality of Hayne's poetry, focusing on his use of detail and observation.

Paul Hamilton Hayne belonged to a prominent South Carolina family, several members of which had made important contributions to the history of the state. One of these, Robert Y. Hayne, Daniel Webster's redoubtable opponent in the famous Senate debate on Nullification in 1830, was Paul Hayne's uncle and guardian. Born in the year of the great debate and reared in Charleston, educated in a well‐known private school and at the College of Charleston, Hayne read law with James Louis Petigru, another notable South Carolinian. Early in his twenties, however, he began contributing to the Southern Literary Messenger, Graham's Magazine, and other periodicals and published in the 1850s three slim volumes of poetry while editing...