Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country
From this medley of early colonial discovery and romance, from the memories of war and reconstrue tion, it has been as difficult to choose coherently as to maintain restraint in selection among the many grotesque negro legends and superstitions so rich in imagery and music. Coupled with this there has been another task; that of keeping these legends and stories in then natural matrix, the semi-tropical landscape of the Low Country, which somehow lends them all a pensively melancholy yet fitting back ground. Not to have so portrayed them, would have been to sacrifice their essentially local tang. To the reader unfamiliar with coastal Carolina, the unique aspects of its landscapes may seem exaggerated inthese pages; the observant visitor and the native will, it is hoped, recognize that neither the colors nor the shadows are too strong. These poems, however, are not local only, they are stories and pictures of a chapter of American history little known, but dramatic and colorful, and in the relation of an important part to the whole they may carry a decided interest to the country at large.
Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void. It has been said, perhaps wisely, that the immediate future of American Poetry lies rather in the intimate feeling of local poets Who can interpret their own sections to the rest of the country as Robin son and Frost have done so nobly for New England, rather than in the effort to yawp universally. Hence there is no attempt here to say, 0 New York, 0 Pennsylvania, but simply, 0 Carolina.
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