From Cliff and Scaur

Benjamin Sledd (1864-1940) spent his life teaching English at Wake Forest College, in a state that had almost no literary life to speak of when he arrived. This was his first book, published at thirty-three: verse about the Blue Ridge, about the Virginia he came from, about loss — the idiom of the 1890s, gentle and formal, with Tennyson audible behind it.He is remembered less for these poems than for what he set in motion. Gerald W. Johnson and a generation of Southern writers passed through his classroom and said afterwards that he was the one who made literature seem possible to them. A small book, then, but from the point where a regional literature begins to acquire teachers.This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1897 edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.