The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. Currently there is no single book available on the American South that covers such a broad range of time and that includes poems not only by Southerners but also by other famous observers of the South who came from elsewhere, mixing poetry from the pre-Revolutionary, ante-bellum, Civil War, and Victorian eras, alongside 20th- and 21st-century poems.