In the following essay excerpt, Starke speculates on the date of composition of "The Song of the Chattahoochee," and points out numerous "defects in the poem."

One other poem by Lanier may have been written in 1877, "The Song of the Chattahoochee," a poem so successful in onomatopoeia that it early caught the popular fancy and has become perhaps the best known of all Lanier's poems. In the 1884 volume of collected poems Mrs. Lanier gives the date of composition as 1877, and in the table of contents notes the original publication as "Scott's Magazine, 1877." But Scott's Magazine had ceased existence in 1869. Inasmuch as the poem was printed in the Independent for December 20, 1883, exactly as given in the collected poems, one might guess that the poem had not been published during Lanier's lifetime, and that the date of composition may well have been 1877. However, at least one poem, "A Song...