Paul Hamilton Hayne

Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-1886). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Hamilton Hayne (January 1, 1830 - July 6, 1886) was a 19th-century southern American poet, essayist, and editor.

Life

Overview

Hayne, born at Charleston, South Carolina, of an old family, contributed to various magazines, and published Poems (1885), containing "Legends and Lyrics." His graceful verses show the influence of Keats. His sonnets are some of his best work.

Youth and education

Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the only child of Emily (McElhenney) and navy lieutenant Paul Hayne. His father died when Hayne was only 1 year old; he was raised by his mother in the home of his prosperous and prominent uncle, Robert Y. Hayne (died 1839), an orator and politician who served in the United States Senate.

Hayne was educated in Charleston city schools, and graduated from the College of Charleston in 1852.

Career

Hayne began the practice of law but soon abandoned it in order to pursue his literary interests and ambitions.

Hayne served in the Confederate army in 1861 and remained in the army until his health failed. He lost all of his possessions — including his house and an extensive library — when Charleston was bombarded in 1862.

In 1863, Hayne moved his family to Grovetown, Georgia, a wooded area about 16 miles from Augusta, Georgia. Here Hayne lived and worked until his death in 1886. Grovetown was also where his career as a literary critic and magazine editor began. He contributed to important magazines of the South during his era, including the Charleston Literary Gazette, the Southern Literary Messenger, the Home Journal, and Southern Bivouac. Hayne was also instrumental with Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms in the founding of Russell's Magazine, which Hayne edited.

Hayne is also noteworthy for his friendship with fellow Southern poet Henry Timrod, whom Hayne helped with both his life and his career. Timrod was frail and ill throughout his life with tuberculosis, and Hayne helped to provide financially for Timrod and his wife and young son. Most importantly for literature and history, Hayne preserved Timrod's poems and edited them into a collection that was published in 1872 and that presented such historically important poems as "The Cotton Boll" and "Ode Sung On The Occasion Of Decorating The Graves Of The Confederate Dead". Timrod now has the greater reputation as a poet, while Hayne is known more for his role as an editor and literary critic than as a poet. Timrod has continued to influence other modern Southern writers, including poet Allen Tate, whose most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead," owes a great deal to Timrod's similarly titled poem.

Hayne died at his home, Copse Hill, at Grovetown, Georgia.

Writing

Hayne was an emerging poet and published various collections of poems, including a complete edition in 1882. His poetry emphasizes romantic verse, long narrative poems, and ballads. Like other fellow Southern poets of his day, his work was highly descriptive of nature. Some critics contend that his graceful lyrics reflect the influence of poet John Keats. Hayne's sonnets are considered his best work. He was appreciated even in the north, and became known throughout the country as the unofficial poet laureate of the South.

Quotations

"One feels assured that nineteen-twentieths of those poems in the English or any other language, which are fitted to stand the tests of time and criticism, are not the first rude transcripts of thoughts thrown off in the heat of creative enthusiasm, but the elaborated compositions of days, weeks, nay, perhaps months of artistic labor. Many beautiful productions which to the superficial readers appear to be improvisations, gushing unstudied from the heart, and subjected to no after revision or modification, belong, in fact, to the maturest efforts of the intellect."

Recognition

The Paul Hayne School in Birmingham, Alabama was named for Hayne after he sent an original poem and a book of verse to the school on the occasion of its dedication in 1886.

Publications

Paul Hamilton Hayne, Poems, 1882. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Poetry

• Poems. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1855.
• Sonnets, and other poems. Charleston, SC: Harper & Calvo, 1857.
• Avolio: A legend of the island of Cos; with Poems, lyrical, miscellaneous, and dramatic. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860.
• "The Kentucky Partisan." New York: James Porteus, 1867.
• Legends and Lyrics. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1872.
• The Mountain of the Lovers, with poems of nature and tradition. New York: E.J. Hale, 1875.
• Poems. Boston: D. Lothrop, 1878; complete edition, 1882.
• The Broken Battalions. Baltimore: privately printed for Mrs. H. Newell Martin, 1885.
• Richard Beale Davis, An Unpublished Poem by Paul Hamilton Hayne. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1947.

Non-fiction

• Allan Herbert. 1860.
• "Poe's Method of Writing." New York: Appleton's Journal, 1872.
• Lives of Robert Young Hayne and Hugh Swinton Legare. Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans, & Cogswell, 1878.

Edited

• The Poems of Henry Timrod. New York: D.J. Hale, 1872.

Letters

• A Collection of Hayne Letters (edited by David Morley McKeithan). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1944.
• Correspondence of Bayard Taylor and Paul Hamilton Hayne (edited by Charles Duffy). Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1945.
• Charles Duffy, "A Southern Genteelist: Letters by Paul Hamilton Hayne to Julia C.R. Dorr." South Carolina Historical & Genealogical Magazine, 1952.
• A Man of Letters in the Nineteenth-Century South: Selected letters (edited by Rayburn S. Moore). Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press 1982.

Poem- This, too, shall pass away! by Paul Hamilton Hayne

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets
• List of literary critics

References

• Moore, Rayburn S. Paul Hamilton Hayne. Twayne Publishers, 1972.

Fonds

His papers are variously preserved in the libraries of the College of Charleston, Duke University, the University of Virginia, and the South Carolina Historical Society.

External links

Poems

• "Freshness of Poetic Perception"
• 3 poems by Hayne: "By the Autumn Sea"October," "The Breezes of June"
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at Sonnet Central (7 sonnets)
• Paul Hamilton Hayne in An American Anthology, 1787-1900: "A Little While I Fain Would Linger Yet," "Aspects of the Pines," "A Storm in the Distance," "Between the sunken sun and the new moon," "In Harbor," "The Rose and Thorn," "Vicksburg"
• Paul Hamilton Hayne profile & 12 poems at My Poetic Side
• Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne at the University of North Carolina
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at PoemHunter (22 poems)
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at AllPoetry (414 poems)

Audio / video

• "Freshness of Poetic Perception" at LibriVox
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at YouTube

Books

• Paul Hamilton Hayne at Amazon.com
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at the Internet Archive

About

• Hayne, Paul Hamilton at the South Carolina Encyclopedia
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at Documenting the American South
• The Poetry of Paul Hamilton Hayne: An introduction"
• Paul Hamilton Hayne at Find a Grave