In the footsteps of Shoeless Joe
A visit to another state should be prefaced by reading one of its poets, so for a trip to Greenville, South Carolina, I chose Henry Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, over Hootie and the Blowfish. ‘Cling to the lowly earth, and be content!’ commanded Timrod, a favorite of Bob Dylan’s. The Nobelist borrowed a few words (‘along yon dim Atlantic line’) from Timrod for ‘Cross the Green Mountain’, an eight-minute Stonewall Jackson-flavored masterpiece he wrote for Ron Maxwell’s Civil War film Gods and Generals (2003). Dylan, an equal opportunity sampler, also filched lines for the song from ‘Come up from the fields father’ by that barbaric yawper of the Union, Walt Whitman.
