Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms

by James Everett Kibler (Editor)

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nearly two hundred of the most sophisticated examples of Simms's extant poetry-signed and unsigned, published and unpublished.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.

488 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2010

About the author

James Everett Kibler is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches popular courses in Southern literature, examining such figures as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and Larry Brown. Born and raised in upcountry South Carolina, Kibler spends much of his spare time tending to the renovation of an 1804 plantation home and the reforestation of the surrounding acreage. This home served as the subject of his first book, Our Fathers' Fields: A Southern Story, for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Heritage Society's Award for Literary Achievement.

Kibler received his doctorate from the University of South Carolina, and his poetry has been honored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina and has appeared in publications throughout the country. In October 2004, the League of the South bestowed on him the Jefferson Davis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kibler enjoys gardening, organic farming, and research into Southern history and culture. An avid preservationist, he prescribes to Allen Tate's comment that "the task of the civilized intelligence is perpetual salvage." He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Southern Garden History Society, the League of the South, and the William Gilmore Simms Society. He is listed in Contemporary Writers', "Who's Who in America," and "Who's Who in the World." He divides his time between Whitmire, South Carolina, and Athens, Georgia.