Despite the claim of Scott Morris Jr. in Confederate Poets that “[t]he poet-physician [Ticknor] never bothered to collect his verses in one volume … once they were published in magazines or journals they were forgotten” (Morris 16), there is reason to think that Ticknor viewed the “War Poems” as parts of a unified work and arranged them in something like their current order. They are prefaced by a dedication he himself wrote, “To the Women of the South … I... Read more

  While the nation as a whole at the outbreak of the Civil War was experiencing a vogue for a romanticized British past of wise kings, gallant knights, and courtly damsels, this fascination was particularly strong in the Southern states. Southerners had a marked tendency to develop fixations on symbols of heroic British knighthood and apply those symbols to themselves. Jason Philips, in Looming Civil War, describes their particular fascination for Henry “Hotspur” Percy, the fifteenth-century English rebel leader immortalized... Read more