Nothing would have given Will Percy greater delight—he died in January 1942—than this Collected Poems, for although he was lawyer, soldier, cosmopolitan, plantation-owner, and patriot, it was as a poet that he chose to think himself. And indeed this is a volume to be treasured by those whose memories go fondly back to days of quieter, more contemplative living. For Percy was not in any sense a modernist; his love of tradition is as evident in these poems as it was in his prose. Here again is the same gentle quality of nostalgia which has made Lanterns on the Levee one of the most charming and authentic pictures of the old South at its best. Percy’s first book of poems, Sappho in Levkas, was issued in 1905 and was followed by three others: In April Once (1920), Enzio’s Kingdom (1924), and Selected Poems (1930). In all of his poetry, Percy’s phrasing is lyric and dramatic; his verse forms subtly musical and finely regular—truly the work of a man who dreamed of the past and feared—all too prophetically—a dark and ominous future.
Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885–1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life—although his life was exciting and varied—but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy—Will's nephew and adopted son—recalls the strong character and easy grace of "the most extraordinary man I have ever known."
In this evocative biography, Benjamin E. Wise presents the singular life of William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist from Mississippi. Though Percy is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist. We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise's exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy's already compelling life story--his prominent family's troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. This biography sets Percy's life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise's hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one.
This antiquarian volume contains a collection of Arthur O'shaughnessy’s poetry, with an introduction by William Alexander Percy. Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (1844 - 1881) was a seminal British poet of Irish descent. This collection would make for a great addition to any personal library, and it is not to be missed by fans of O'shaughnessy’s wonderful work. The poems include: “Exile”, “The Fair Maid and the Sun”, “The Cypress”, “A Whisper from the Grave”, “Bisclavaret”, “Thought”, “Palm Flowers”, “John the Baptists”, “Salome”, “The Fountain of Tears”, “The Spectre of the Past”, “Lover after Death”, “From Music and Moonlight”, “Ode”, etcetera. William Alexander Percy (1885 - 1942) was an American lawyer and poet. A fascinating and intellectually gifted individual, "A lantern on the Levee" (his autobiography), was a bestseller on its publication in 1941. Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
Although the novels of Walker Percy represent some of the most prominent work in 20th-century Southern fiction, the Percy family itself has a history that is arguably as compelling as anything he could have created. Behind Percy's prose lurks a legacy of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, and suicide that spans two centuries. In this compelling biography, Wyatt-Brown skilfully combines intensive research and telling insights to produce the unforgettable story of this gifted family. 48 halftones.
Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but more private dedication to literature. Following four generations of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy’s son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will’s nephew and adopted son, the novelist Walker Percy. Known as the “gray eagle of the delta” for his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the family’s property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy’s death in 1888, LeRoy Percy inherited his father’s law practice and his mantle of leadership in the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to continue his father’s long quest for an adequate levee system; struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan’s grip of fear on the delta; and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the state’s rising demagogue politicians. In the election of 1911, LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate, losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the “White Chief.” It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues’ fiery gospel of resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father’s side throughout many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But Will’s true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past—his memoir Lanterns on the Levee. “During my day,” he wrote Will Percy not long before his death, “ I have witnessed the disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and simplicity.” It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of the Percy family’s values in a world that has little use for aristocrats.
A collection of poems by writers ranging from William Blake and Henry W. Longfellow to Emily Dickinson and Robert L. Stevenson, arranged by topics such as The Seasons, Nursery Rhymes, and Lullabies and Cradle Songs.
