Some years ago three prominent Southern poets set upon Sidney Lanier with vehemence which might be supposed to have silenced him and his disciples forever. “His poetry,” said Allen Tate, “has little to say to this century either in substance or technique.” Lanier's was a “commonplace and confused mind,” intellectually and morally insincere, irresponsible, and incapable of precise expression. Robert Penn Warren called him “The Blind Poet,” so full of self and egocentric theory that his aesthetic perception was atrophied. Sentimental, sensual, and effeminate, his poetry, said Mr. Warren, was at best absurd. Finally, John Crowe Ransom, spokesman for a new Southern agrarianism, disowned Lanier as an apostate who had sold his rebel birthright for a mess of Yankee praise.

This was honest reaction, inevitable and healthy. It was reaction against a man who in the nineteenth century did not think and write as articulate intellectuals from their perspective in the twentieth century saw that he might have thought and written. It was reaction, also, against a reputation which had been swollen by what Lanier called “the cheap triumph of wrong praise” far beyond its proper proportions. Lanier's friends—those of them who, he explained, “do not know what I am about”—had in zeal done him great harm by presenting him as the Galahad of Southern letters, champion of the truest and best of a chivalry which had been despoiled by greed. Even his own protest, seventy years ago, that “any success seems cheap which depends so thoroughly on local pride as does my present position in the South” did little to stem the tide. His reputation grew to become an embarrassment to Southern men like Mr. Ransom, Mr. Tate, and Mr. Warren, who recognized, as he recognized, the invalidity and essential shoddiness of its origin.

Critically, Lanier has always been hard to handle. Except for the juvenile novel called Tiger-Lilies, the guidebook on Florida, and the compilations of stories for boys, only two volumes were published during his lifetime: a thin book of ten poems in 1877 and, three years later, the treatise on The Science of English Verse, which few in his time or ours have had patience to understand. His posthumous volumes were badly edited. Biographical sketches were almost without exception distorted with apology or special pleading. Here and there a careful man like Edwin Mims or Stanley Williams attempted judicious appraisal, with Lanier's faults on one side, his achievements on the other, but the scale, weighted by the critic's intention or his remembrance of past estimates, has swayed so perilously, now up, now down—sometimes in the course of a single examination—that a definitive reading has been difficult, perhaps impossible.

It is well, then, that Sidney Lanier was again to be allowed to speak for himself, as clearly and as completely as he could, of his intention and his achievement. The opportunity was given him by the university which he served two years as a lecturer, through publication in 1945 by the Johns Hopkins Press of The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, edited by Charles R. Anderson and prominent Southern associates. Handsome in format and binding, these ten volumes “bring together in definitive form the body of Lanier's writings so they can be judged as a whole.” The editors have been unobtrusive and skillful, particularly in the essential first two volumes, so that the principal voice throughout is that of Lanier. Only when he is hard to understand or when, as is too often the case, he does not quite seem to know what he is about, do the editors step in with comment or explanation. It is perhaps more than a coincidence that each of them is Southern-born or connected with an outstanding Southern institution: it is as if the South in this edition, which only another war prevented from appearing on the hundredth anniversary of Lanier's birth, were offering its poet in all his excellence and deficiency to the nation for new and unbiased examination. No gesture could be more appropriate or more significant of maturity.

Lanier was allowed to display himself for all critical purposes complete. The first volume contains his verse, all of it, 164 poems, 44 of them collected for the first time, together with fragments, outlines for unfinished poems, and variant readings. Here is the end product, what is essential to knowledge of Lanier as a practicing poet, that on which, in last analysis, he is to be judged. It is fitting that it should be placed first and that its introduction should detail so objectively and with such discrimination the history of Lanier's literary career. It is equally fitting that the second volume should present not only The Science of English Verse, which Karl Shapiro in his Essay on Rime finds to contain suggestions of the “mines of new rhythm” explored in this century by James Joyce, but also the occasional papers on music, which are almost of equal importance for an understanding of Lanier's fumbling for prosodical method. Whatever there is of truth or significance in his theory, which explains poetic technique in terms of musical sound, is there as Lanier formally, though too hurriedly, set it down, enhanced by sixty pages of comment and authoritative explanation.

Less crucial, but also necessary for interpretation of what Lanier intended, were the next two volumes, which included the lectures delivered in Baltimore from 1878 to 1881 at the Peabody Institute and at the Johns Hopkins University. Here is a generous display of literary wares, lore on “Shakespeare and His Forerunners” and in exposition of Lanier's theory of “personality” as it developed from Greek drama to what seemed to him the apex of modern fiction, the novels of George Eliot. They were popular lectures, interspersed with great chunks of “readings” (many of which have now been wisely omitted), and, as gathered here, with errors of previous editions quietly corrected, probably reproduce as effectively as scholarly legerdemain ever can the combination of excitement and lofty sentiment that attracted so many people to Lanier as he spoke. Hastily written, sometimes pretentious, and full of ex-cathedra asides which must have been the delight of the unlearned, these two volumes are perhaps the bravest of the ten, because they present many of Lanier's ideas, half-formed and pompously inconsistent, just as they came from his pen when the deadline of next week's lecture hurried him on. They were meant for oral delivery, cadenced, we suppose, to the mellow tones of Lanier's voice. Certainly no eye was to read them until they had been cleared of debris.

Yet, cluttered as these lectures are with the repetitious and unessential, Lanier does speak to us through them of his critical theory and literary aim. Perhaps he did pontificate, posturing behind learning which he had not made his own, because he was on trial and wanted a job at the splendid new university at Baltimore; but, for all this, his own sincere prejudices and enthusiasms break persistently through. He was certainly doing more than appealing to conservative convictions of audience or trustees when, after a conventional diatribe directed against Whitman's man of brawn and muscle, he confided:

My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure, the democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future, may have a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle hell; he shall play ball with the earth; and albeit his stature may be no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than the great redwoods of California; his height shall be the height of great resolution and love and faith and beauty and knowledge and subtle meditation; his head shall be forever among the stars.

Perhaps it seems ridiculous that so many words are wrapped so lovingly about so small a thought, or that so well-conceived a figure is allowed to dribble off to so tenuously meaningful an end. Lanier's own head was forever among the stars, and he seems never to have learned enough of language or himself to translate what he found of vision there into other than conventional generalities. His Tiger-Lilies is unreadable, not so much because of bad models in Novalis and Longfellow, but because it never succeeds in saying what Lanier must have meant it to say. It is a young man's headful of ideas, allowed to churn meaninglessly because the words he had learned got in the way of his expression. So the pieces gathered as “Southern Prose,” which share the same volume with his early novel, also represent Lanier at his loquacious and inarticulate worst. His models seem often the grandfathers of Senator Claghorn, and the tight-clenched sincerity of what he meant cannot, even in tolerance, gainsay such things as his approval of photography as an “etherealization” of painting because it portrays “little ones saying prayers at mothers' knees” rather than “bloody heeled conquerors soiling the plains”; or his sentimental apostrophe to “old comrades who lie sleeping about the yard beneath tomb and hillock and sculptured pillar”; or the funeral oration in which, after picturing partners, colleagues, brethren of the bar, admirers, and friends glorifying the tomb of the deceased with floral offerings, Lanier portrays himself as one who “steals in modestly and quietly, and as it were in secret lets fall his humble violet from the woods upon the glorious pile of homage, dropping thereon his unobtrusive tear.” Surely, the English language and sincerity of grief have seldom been more unfeelingly profaned.

It may be unfair to Lanier to catch him up on these words, which only echo tones and phrases of his mellifluous generation. But we cannot pass them by, as we can the hack work of the volume which follows, the guide to Florida, the magazine articles on India, and other prose, which he wrote to sell so that he might have money to support him as he meditated poetry; for the honeyed tone and heightened phrase become as much a part of Lanier's personality as his straight, black beard and his deep-set, consumptive's eyes. His own words seem to have acted on Lanier much as did the playing of sweet music, suggestive of meaning never expressed. Like the tones he drew from his flute, they served as an opiate which allowed him to escape the traps of poverty, obscurity, and disease which mortality had laid for him, to soar for a moment to a pure atmosphere of his own making, where love ruled as kindly despot and where coughs and the ugly noise of trade had no place. Such luxuriance of expression was not, then, a pose struck as Lanier faced an audience: it became his natural idiom (though as a younger and more robust man he fought against it), the best he could find to communicate the warm glow of understanding with which the words themselves transfused him.

But our rational generation would make a thinker out of each of its prophets. And Lanier presents himself as a man of very few thoughts. He did draw both the evolutionary doctrines of the late nineteenth century and an earlier romantic perfectionism into his tolerant embrace to explain what he called the “etherealization” of all things from gross to spiritual manifestations, but his exposition could have convinced few, even of his generation, except as it reinforced their desire to believe that all things work together toward good. His reaction against trade and his championship of love as a panacea for earthly ills was certainly less intellectual than emotional. Even his theories of art, specifically his analogies between music and poetry, grew from his attempt to transfer to words the exquisitely sweet feelings which music induced and were the results of feeling rather than thought. Like most of us, Lanier seems to have been an enthusiastic rationalizer of what he believed to be true. Let us, he said, “feel more and think less! … Let us, who surely have seen and known some genuine Beauty and genuine Sorrow—let us trust these more.”

As a thinker Lanier may in formal exposition deceive for a moment, but in the more than eleven hundred letters reproduced in the last four volumes of this edition he offers himself more candidly for examination. Struck off in varied tempos of exhilaration, despair, affection, or indignation, some dulled with fatigue, others hysterical with fever, these bring us as close as we have probably ever been brought to the day-by-day workings of an artist's mind. Lanier writes with no audience in view except the person to whom he is writing. Now he is the poet misunderstood, complaining of the “entire loneliness” of his literary life or ridiculing the “tobacco-sodden bosh such as Southern editors are prone to eject.” Now he brags: whatever the world's estimate, he had “never yet failed to win favor with an artist.” We, more properly schooled in reticence, may be embarrassed by the unrestrained outpourings of his love for Mary Day Lanier or by his proudly innocent flirtations with other women. We may be repelled by his intensity throughout. But the man finally revealed is—we must borrow his favorite words to describe him—infinitely sweet and courageous, to the point that we are again tempted to agree that Lanier's life was incomparably his greatest poem. Here, certainly, is material of which the biographer, the psychologist, and the critic can make amply effective use.

Now, as we read Lanier in moods he never meant us to discover, we are impressed with the single-minded purpose of his ambition, how hard he worked, how much he planned, how fervently he aspired toward greatness. He would tour the country with an orchestra to lecture the public into appreciation of fine music. He would organize “Schools for Grown People” in leading Eastern cities to instruct American adults in literature, art, science, and the improvement of home life. With his brother as partner, he would start his own publishing house, to which he would commit himself for at least two books a year for the next ten years. He would produce a new flute to revolutionize the modern orchestra. He would be Professor of the Physics of Music at Peabody, Professor of Law at Mercer, Professor of Metaphysics at the Johns Hopkins, Professor of English Literature at the proposed new state university at Thomasville, Georgia.

While he sought a livelihood which would allow him to live quietly with his family, his music, and his poetry, Lanier's head teemed with plans—“if the days were forty-eight hours long I would scarcely get through the modicum of work for each.” He jumped at each opportunity to write for money so that he could find time to write for fame. He accepted every possible employment as musician. He planned a treatise on metaphysics which would make him famous, a four-volume history of The First Thousand Years of English Verse, more books for boys and girls, and on his deathbed listed ten works half-finished or contemplated. We marvel at him—almost six feet tall, weighing sometimes only 113 pounds, and tortured, withal, “with a living egg of pain under my collarbone.” Even The Science of English Verse, he tells us, “was wrung out of me. I have no desire ever to write anything but poetry, and keenly feel that I go to all else with only half my heart.”

This, only a little more than a year before he died, hints at a climax of Lanier's lifetime struggle between his passion for music and his dedication to poetry. It was compromise rather than victory, the result perhaps of failure ever satisfactorily to answer the question he first asked himself in his teens: “What is the province of music in the economy of the world?” In 1861 he was sure that “the prime inclination, that is natural bent … of my nature is to music.” Three years later he found that “gradually … my whole soul is merging itself into the business of writing, especially writing poetry.” Just after the war, however, he wrote to Mary Day of music: “Cling to it, it is the only thing, the only reality”; and by 1873 he could explain to Paul Hamilton Hayne: “Whatever turn I have for art, is purely musical; poetry being, to me, a mere tangent.” When knowledge that tuberculosis must inevitably cut short his life made Lanier vow that, in spite of being “born on the wrong side of Mason-and-Dickson's line,” he would devote his remaining years to art, he admitted: “Things come to me mostly in one of two forms,—the poetic or the musical. I express myself with most freedom in the former modus: with most passionate delight in the latter.”

More than fifty years ago H. A. Beers suggested that Lanier's failure as an artist resulted from his wrong choice of the two roads of music and poetry, and many critics since have caught at the hint to explain that he was first and spontaneously a musician, only secondly and more artificially a poet. However this may be, the possibility of Lanier's ever having attained breadth of achievement as a creative musician (one large quarrel with the Centennial Edition is that it does not reproduce his songs) must be discounted by his critical attitude toward music. His approach to it was literary. He expected it to say things. It did say things to him, of cavaliers and fair ladies, of huntsmen and wooded glens, of flirtations and minuets. As Edwin Mims has said, “He saw music as he heard poetry.” And he felt music, as “a great, pure, unanalyzable yearning after God.” Music was thus the matrix, not only of Lanier's personality and profound religious belief, but of his artistic creed: “Language is a species of music.” The poet expressed the inexpressible so that “every poet worthy of that name must in his essential utterance belong to the School of David.” He is the “Forlorn Hope that marches ahead of mankind,” singing even truths which are belied by appearances.

Music inspired Lanier with vague imaginings, “infinitely sweet and high and lovely.” When he played his flute, he watched listeners who “grew solemn and tender, and gazed at me with earnest and half-wondering eyes as at one bringing news from other worlds.” Music bore messages, created images, and by means—Lanier learned this in the hardest of ways, as a neophyte in a professional orchestra—of a technique which was greatly exact and scientific. Language, then, as adjunct to music, might through discovery of its own laws more clearly explain the tantalizing “great deeps, the wild heights, the dear, sweet springs, the broad and generous-bosomed rivers, the manifold exquisite flowers, the changeful seasons, the starry skies, the present, the past, the future—of the world of music.”

Again Lanier's words ran away with whatever thought had originally called them up, hypnotizing him by the rise and swell of their rhythm, by the “sweet” images they evoked. It was not only, as Lanier said of Poe, that he did not know enough. Lanier recognized his intellectual shortcomings and tried pathetically to cram himself with knowledge that could give meaning to his imaginings. If only he might have one year in the universities of Europe! He applied for a fellowship at Johns Hopkins—to study science, metaphysics, and literature. Oh, for a few weeks more in the laboratory of the physicist friend he found in New York! But life drove him relentlessly on, so that he died at thirty-nine without opportunity ever to mold what he did know into forms which more than suggested his meaning. Harried by poignant assurance that his years were few, handicapped by pain and poverty, overworked and distracted, he was allowed neither time nor tranquillity properly to examine himself or the words to which he intrusted his interpretation of what Virginia Woolf called the “luminous halo” which surrounds existence.

Another way of expressing much the same thing might be to say that Lanier simply never matured, or, better, that amid the febrile business of his life, he never allowed himself opportunity for maturity. His reach so far exceeded his grasp that the present edition may seem, as someone has said, a cumbersomely large pedestal for a very small statue. But Lanier's acknowledgment of literary debts to Emerson, Whitman, Poe, and Hayne, and the ample suggestions offered here and elsewhere that he has spoken in our generation to Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, perhaps to Robert Frost, place him unequivocally within the main current of American poetry. He knew, as did Walter Pater, that “all art constantly aspires.” And he knew, as Milton knew, that only very great men write great poems. It is not difficult to pick him apart, to expose, as he exposed better than any commentator, his grievous deficiencies. He stood for a moment breathlessly on tiptoe to see beyond sectional, beyond national boundaries to a world of spirit, which all men might enter. Though the mysterious regions he dared explore with such meager equipment yielded him few poems which measure to his standards or ours, none need be ashamed of Sidney Lanier, or embarrassed that his was a forlorn hope. He knew, as W. H. Auden said many decades after him, that “we must love one another or die.” And he knew, most surely, that “beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.”