WHY the Southern Renaissance ever occurred is still something of a mystery. All that is attempted here is an analysis of some explanations that have been offered by others and a few additional speculations. Before turning to the critical why, however, it is necessary to determine just what it is we are talking about. In the first place, we are stuck with a misnomer in the very word "renaissance." For neither in its literal sense nor in its classic historical usage is this French word really applicable to what happened in the South. As for the literal meaning when applied to that phenomenon, Allen Tate has observed that "it was more precisely a birth, not a rebirth." Certainly nothing comparable had happened before in the South that could conceivably be said to have been reborn in the twentieth century. The second and more common historical usage of "renaissance" is the one to describe the evocation of the ghost of a dead civilization, as the ghost of Hellenic culture was evoked in thirteenth to fifteenth-century Italy. And surely nothing of that sort took place in the South. Nevertheless, we are stuck with this misnomer and will continue to use it. It has been applied with comparable looseness to New England in the early nineteenth century and by F. O. Matthiessen to Northern letters in the 1850's.