Sidney Lanier



Sidney Clopton Lanier (February 3, 1842 - September 7, 1881) was an American poet, musician, and academic.

Life
Sidney Lanier was bornin Macon, Georgia, to parents Robert Sampson Lanier and Mary Jane Anderson; he was mostly of English ancestry. His distant French Huguenot ancestors immigrated to England in the 16th century fleeing religious persecution. He began playing the flute at an early age, and his love of that musical instrument continued throughout his life. He attended Oglethorpe University near Milledgeville, Georgia, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He graduated first in his class shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

He fought in the Civil War, primarily in the tidewater region of Virginia, where he served in the Confederate signal corps. Later, he and his brother Clifford served as pilots aboard English blockade runners. On one of these voyages, his ship was boarded. Refusing to take the advice of the British officers on board to don one of their uniforms and pretend to be one of them, he was captured. He was incarcerated in a military prison at Point Lookout in Maryland, where he contracted tuberculosis (generally known as "consumption" at the time). He suffered greatly from this disease, then incurable and usually fatal, for the rest of his life.

Shortly after the war, he taught school briefly, then moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he worked as a desk clerk at The Exchange Hotel and also performed as a musician. He was the regular organist at The First Presbyterian Church in nearby Prattville. He wrote his only novel, Tiger Lilies (1867) while in Alabama. In 1867, he moved to Prattville, at that time a small town just north of Montgomery, where he taught and served as principal of a school.

He married Mary Day of Macon in 1876 and moved back to his hometown, where he began working in his father's law office.

After taking and passing the Georgia bar, Lanier practiced as a lawyer for several years. During this period he wrote a number of poems, using the "cracker" and "negro" dialects of his day, about poor white and black farmers in the Reconstruction South. He traveled extensively through southern and eastern portions of the United States in search of a cure for his tuberculosis.

While on one such journey in Texas, he rediscovered his native and untutored talent for the flute and decided to travel to the northeast in hopes of finding employment as a musician in an orchestra. Unable to find work in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, he signed on to play flute for the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore, Maryland, shortly after its organization. He taught himself musical notation and quickly rose to the position of first flautist. He was famous in his day for his performances of a personal composition for the flute called "Black Birds," which mimics the song of that species.

In an effort to support Mary and their three sons, he also wrote poetry for magazines. His most famous poems were "Corn" (1875), "The Symphony" (1875), "Centennial Meditation" (1876), "The Song of the Chattahoochee" (1877), "The Marshes of Glynn" (1878), and "Sunrise" (1881). The latter two poems are generally considered his greatest works. They are part of an unfinished set of lyrical nature poems known as the "Hymns of the Marshes", which describe the vast, open salt marshes of Glynn County on the coast of Georgia. There is a historical marker in Brunswick commemorating the writing of "The Marshes of Glynn". The largest bridge in Georgia (as of 2005), a short distance from the marker, is named The Sidney Lanier Bridge.

Later life
Late in his life, he became a student, lecturer, and, finally, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, specializing in the works of the English novelists, Shakespeare, the Elizabethan sonneteers, Chaucer, and the Anglo-Saxon poets. He published a series of lectures entitled The English Novel (published posthumously in 1883) and a book entitled The Science of English Verse (1880), in which he developed a novel theory exploring the connections between musical notation and meter in poetry.

Lanier finally succumbed to complications caused by his tuberculosis on September 7, 1881, while convalescing with his family near Lynn, North Carolina. He was 39. Lanier is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.

Writing
With his theory connecting musical notation with poetic meter, he developed a unique style of poetry written in logaoedic dactyls, which was strongly influenced by the works of his beloved Anglo-Saxon poets. He wrote several of his greatest poems in this meter, including "Revenge of Hamish" (1878), "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise". In Lanier's hands, the logaoedic dactylic meter led to a free-form, almost prose-like style of poetry that was greatly admired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, and other leading poets and critics of the day. A similar poetical meter was independently developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins at about the same time. (There is no evidence that Lanier and Hopkins knew each other or that either of them had read any of the other's works).

Recognition
Lanier is commemorated by a large and elaborate bronze and granite sculptural monument, created by Hans K. Schuler and located on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to the monument at Johns Hopkins, Lanier was also later memorialized on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Upon the construction of the iconic Duke Chapel between 1930 and 1935 on the university's West Campus, a statue of Lanier was included alongside two fellow prominent Southerners, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee. This statue, which appears to show a Lanier older than the 39 years he actually lived, is situated on the right side of the portico leading into the Chapel narthex. It is prominently featured on the cover of the 2010 autobiographical memoir Hannah's Child, by Stanley Hauerwas, a Methodist theologian teaching at Duke Divinity School.

Lanier's poem "The Marshes of Glynn" is the inspiration for a cantata by the same name that was created by the modern English composer Andrew Downes to celebrate the Royal Opening of the Adrian Boult Hall in Birmingham, England, in 1986.

Piers Anthony used Lanier, his life, and his poetry in his science-fiction novel Macroscope (1969). He quotes from "The Marshes of Glynn" and other references appear throughout the novel.

Several places have been named for Sidney Lanier.

Geography

 * Lanier Heights Neighborhood, Washington, D.C.
 * Lanier County, Georgia
 * Lake Lanier, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers northeast of Atlanta, Georgia
 * Lake Lanier in Tryon, North Carolina
 * Sydney Lanier Bridge, Brunswick, Georgia

Schools

 * Sidney Lanier School in Gainesville, Florida
 * Lanier University short-lived university, first Baptist, then owned by the Ku Klux Klan, in Atlanta, Georgia
 * The Sidney Lanier Building (previously Sidney Lanier Elementary School) on the campus of Glynn Academy, in Brunswick, Georgia
 * Lanier Middle School in Buford, Georgia
 * Lanier Elementary School in Gainesville, Georgia
 * Sidney Lanier Bridge over the South Brunswick River in Brunswick, Georgia
 * Sidney Lanier Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma
 * Sidney Lanier High School in Austin, Texas
 * Sidney Lanier Expressive Arts Vanguard Elementary School in Dallas, Texas
 * Lanier Middle School in Houston, Texas
 * Lanier High School in San Antonio, Texas
 * Lanier Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia
 * Sidney Lanier Elementary School in Tampa, Florida

Other

 * Sidney Lanier Cottage, the birthplace of Lanier, in Macon, Georgia

Poetry

 * The Centennial Meditation of Columbia: A Cantata for the Inaugural Ceremonies. New York: Scribner's, 1876. 
 * Poems of Sidney Lanier (edited by Mary Day Lanier). New York: Scribner's, 1891.
 * Select Poems of Sidney Lanier (edited by Morgan Callaway). New York: Scribner's, 1899.

Non-fiction

 * The Science of English Verse. New York: Scribner's, 1880.
 * The English Novel: A study in the development of personality. New York: Scribner's, 1897.

Children's stories

 * The Boy's Froissart. New York: Scribner's, 1879. (a retelling of Jean Froissart's Froissart's Chronicles).
 * The Boy's King Arthur. New York: Scribner's, 1880. (based on Sir Thomas Malory's compilation of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table).
 * The Boy's Mabinogion. New York: Scribner's, 1881. (based on the early Welsh legends of King Arthur, as retold in the Red Book of Hergest)
 * The Boy's Percy. New York: Scribner's, 1882. (old ballads of war, adventure and love based on Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.)

Letters

 * Letters of Sidney Lanier: Selections from His Correspondence, 1866-1881. New York: Scribner's, 1899.
 * Some reminiscences and early letters of Sidney Lanier. Macon, GA: J.W. Burke, 1907.