"I Hear Such Strange Things of the Union's Fate": Charles Carter Lee's Virginia Georgics

                        Though what if EarthBe but the shadow of Heaven, and things thereinEach to other like more than on earth is thought?

—Milton, Paradise Lost V, 574–76 —Epigraph, Virginia Georgics IV

Despite the pervasive influence of Virgil's Georgics on early American literature, few eighteenth-century American poets attempted formal imitations of Virgil's agricultural poem. Yet a late recrudescence of georgic verse occurs in antebellum Virginia, in two remarkably energetic and lively poems. The first, a 173-line poem originally published in the Farmer's Register in 1834 and reintroduced to scholars by Clarence Gohdes in the Southern Literary Journal (1978), is the anonymous "Old Virginia Georgics," a progressive-minded survey of a languishing local agriculture which wittily adapts George Crabbe's satirical ploy of contrasting the literary (Virgilian pastoral) ideal with its dismal real-life counterpart in the poet's native environment.¹ The second, a much more ambitious work running to nearly three thousand lines, has been largely forgotten: Charles Carter Lee's four-part Virginia Georgics, published in Richmond on the eve of the Civil War—or to quote its title page, Virginia Georgics, Written for the Hole and Corner Club of Powhatan, by Charles Carter Lee, One of Its Members, and Published by the Club (James Woodhouse and Company, 1858). It is a rare book: though Dwight Durling mentions the work in the standard history of English georgic, he was himself unable to see it. His report is based on an article by the Virginia classicist Herbert Lipscomb in the Journal of American Philology, 1922. Lipscomb's article, which offers a succinct description of Lee's poem, remains the only published account to date of this intriguing poem.

Charles Carter Lee (1798–1871), eldest son of the Revolutionary commander Light-Horse Harry Lee and brother of General Robert E. Lee, must surely rank as one of the most prolific belletrists of his day. In 1842 he published (anonymously, in Washington) a mytho-historical romance in eight cantos, The Maid of the Doe; A Lay of the Revolution.² This work and Virginia Georgics are all Lee ever published in book form. But his papers in the Alderman Library in Charlottesville contain sonnets by the score, together with patriotic odes, verse epistles and dialogues, plays, essays, lectures, speeches, diaries, an unfinished autobiography, the draft of a political novel, and a blank verse meditation on the Civil War.³ Gentlemen writers were plentiful in nineteenth-century Virginia, which produced few professional authors (besides Poe, a doubtful exception). Few Virginian writers can have kept their hand in for quite as long as Carter Lee. When he published Virginia Georgics, written in vigorous, colloquial and robustly fustian heroic couplets, he had been writing verse continuously for 41 years.

Carter Lee was born in 1798 at Stratford, the Lees' famous plantation on the Potomac, and the birthplace, as he points out (p. 42), of the two Lees who signed the Declaration of Independence. His flamboyant, improvident father lost much of his family's wealth in land speculation and died insolvent. Carter Lee's studies at Harvard—he graduated Class of 1819—were funded by his maternal uncle (Nagel 198). The spectre of failure haunted him throughout his varied career: few of his many projects met with success, while he shared his father's tendency to live and scheme beyond his means.⁴ Yet he remained throughout his long life an energetic, resourceful, and likeable man (Nagel 232). At Harvard he was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club,⁵ and in 1818 he distinguished himself by winning both the Bowdoin Prize and the Boylston Prize, the former for an essay on Paradise Lost.⁶ He practiced law in Washington and New York City,⁷ but within a few years he abandoned his legal career to try his hand at developing the remote properties he and his brothers had inherited in the mountains of western Virginia.⁸ A lengthy verse epistle to his political hero Daniel Webster in 1846 is proudly signed "A Mountaneer."⁹ But...