Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570039143 ISBN 13: 9781570039140

Publisher: University of South Carolina Press, 2010

Synopsis

William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) has long held the attention of scholars and general readers alike for his numerous volumes of Southern history and literature, but his poetry-which he considered the truest measure of his literary achievement-has remained largely on the periphery of Simms studies. In 1990 Kibler published the first edition of this volume to make widely available nearly two hundred of the most sophisticated examples of Simms's extant poetry-signed and unsigned, published and unpublished. These poems reveal Simms to be deeply concerned with faith, family, nature, tradition, his native Charleston, and a vision of Southern culture that, while conservative, is more broadly defined than formerly recognized. Simms's mastery of poetic forms is evident as he moves effortlessly from ballads and odes to sonnets and epigrams. His spontaneous lyrics seem modern in their vivid conveyance of emotions, a characteristic rarely matched by his contemporaries, and the rich historical imagination at work in other verses further distinguishes him. This revised edition is augmented with fifteen new poems as well as a new introduction by Kibler reflecting on the past two decades of Simms scholarship. The volume is a clarion call for renewed appreciation of a once forgotten poet now on the cusp of reinstatement as a major American voice.

About this title

About the Author

The most widely published scholar and editor of Simms, John Caldwell Guilds has devoted more than four decades to the study of Simms and his works. Author of the prize-winning biography Simms: A Literary Life and editor of Selected Fiction of William Gilmore Simms: Arkansas Edition, Guilds holds the Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Arkansas. Guilds lives on Cartwright Mountain in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas. Charles Hudson, retired as the Franklin Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, is the author of, among other works, The Southeastern Indians and Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms. Hudson is also the editor of The Ethnology of the Southeastern Indians: A Source Book. Hudson resides in Athens, Georgia.

From the Back Cover

A revised and expanded edition of poems by the renowned nineteenth-century Charleston writer and historian

Edition details

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1570039143
• ISBN 13: 9781570039140
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Kibler James E.