author
Henry Timrod
1828–1867
A leading poetic voice of the American South, he wrote lyric, elegiac verse shaped by illness, war, and a life cut short. He is still remembered most for his Civil War-era poems and for the musical, mournful quality of his writing.
1 Audiobook
Poems of Henry Timrod; with Memoir
by Henry Timrod
About the author
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828, Henry Timrod grew up in a literary household and showed an early gift for poetry. He studied for a time at what is now the University of Georgia, later worked as a tutor and contributed poems and essays to magazines, gradually building a reputation in Southern literary circles.
Timrod is often described as the "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy," a label tied to the Civil War poems that made him widely known in his own region. His life was marked by fragile health and financial hardship, and after the war he lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where he continued to write under increasingly difficult circumstances.
He died in 1867 at just thirty-eight years old. Though his career was brief, his work remained influential in Southern literary history, and readers continue to return to his poetry for its strong feeling, formal grace, and sense of loss.