[In the following essay, Parks considers Sidney Lanier as a poet, examines some of Lanier's better-known poems, and argues that he was never considered a major American poet because his poor health, sketchy education, and didacticism impaired his work.]

Sidney Lanier hoped to become a major poet, and desired that his work be judged on that basis. Overpraise of regional literature disgusted him; as early as 1869 he attacked the “insidious evil … of regarding our literature as Southern literature, our poetry as Southern poetry, our pictures as Southern [sic] pictures. I mean the habit of glossing over the intrinsic defects of artistic productions by appealing to the Southern sympathies of the artist's countrymen.”¹ He was confident that his own work did not need this uncritical partiality. After the rejection of “Corn” by Scribner's and the Atlantic, and after much agonized introspection, he wrote to his wife “I know, through the fieriest tests of life, that I am, in soul, and shall be, in life and in utterance, a great poet” (IX, 105).

He did not achieve that goal. He never became even a major American poet, in the sense that Poe or Whitman or Emily Dickinson is. There are valid, often tragic, reasons. Throughout his adult life he suffered from tuberculosis to an extent that almost every time he completed a major or extended work he was incapacitated by severe hemorrhages of the lungs. His early death cut short work on three projected volumes of verse. For these, he left numerous poem outlines that rarely got much beyond the note-taking stage. A third factor was the precarious state of his personal finances, ranging from downright poverty to, at best, an insufficient and unstable income. Poverty forced him into literary hackwork, sometimes good, as in his redactions for boys of Froissart and of Malory; sometimes respectable, as in the erratic but occasionally brilliant guide and travel book Florida; sometimes degrading, as in the magazine sketches on India, a country which he had never seen. Yet even the best of these sapped energy from a man who had little vitality to spare.

Lanier himself was in part to blame. He had no sooner partially recovered from a tubercular attack than he was planning grandiose projects, many of which he was poorly equipped to carry out. His application for a fellowship in the newly established Johns Hopkins University is almost unbelievable, for it was beyond the ability of a young, vigorous, well-trained man; in September, 1877, Lanier was thirty-five years old, in poor health, and with a decidedly sketchy academic background: “My course of study would be: first, constant research in the physics of musical tone; second, several years devotion to the acquirement of a thoroughly scientific general view of Mineralogy, Botany and Comparative Anatomy; third, French and German Literature” (IX, 474). President Gilman would have none of what Lanier admitted “may seem a nondescript and even flighty process,” although some justification can be found in his belief that good poetry could not be written in his time “unless that poetry and your soul behind it are informed and saturated with at least the largest final conceptions of current science.” Even more disruptive and irrelevant was the plan, growing out of his lectures in Baltimore, to edit an extensive series of anthologies of English poetry and (when established publishers rejected the projects) to publish them himself, although he had little experience as an editor and none as a publisher. At the time when he most needed to husband his energies and concentrate on his major talent, Lanier was spreading himself dangerously thin.

Two other stumbling-blocks he threw in the way of the reader. One was his incessant moralizing and didacticism; it may be justifiable to believe, as Lanier firmly did, that in literature morality is more important than artistry, but it is irritatingly quite another thing to “forgive” writers like Homer, Socrates, Dante, and Shakespeare (among many others: see “The Crystal”) because they sometimes did not live up to his intransigent moral tone, or to dismiss Fielding and Smollett because their works seemed to him prurient. Too frequently Lanier lost all critical perspective, and this loss of perspective vitiates many of his own poems, as it does in “The Crystal.” Less important is his fondness for archaic words and phraseology, his propensity in images to mix the concrete and the abstract, and his use of musical devices to such an extent that many readers consider his poems artificial and contrived.

These defects may be freely admitted, and some of them will be examined later, but there remains a residue of work that is excellent and germinal. Too often Lanier has been praised or condemned for the wrong reasons, and the sane commentaries of Aubrey Starke and Charles R. Anderson have been glided over.

The extant poems written when he was at Oglethorpe College, few in number and deficient in quality, are of value mainly in revealing the great if transitory influence of Poe, Byron, and Coleridge, and the quieter but more enduring influence of his “dearest friend” Keats (I, 228). Sidney's brother Clifford remembered the college poems, many of them no doubt lost, as being “Byronesque, if not Wertheresque, at least tinged with gloominess” (Starke, p. 37). But the gloomy introspection of Byron and Poe was soon replaced by the bracing saneness of Tennyson and, mainly through his favorite essayist Carlyle, by the romantic sentimentalism of the German writers Richter and Novalis. These men had direct formative influence on Lanier's thoughts, and on his writings. Even more direct because it was personal was the influence of Professor James Woodrow, who aroused in Lanier an interest in German lyric poetry and idealistic philosophy, and a continuing interest in trying to reconcile evolutionary thought with Presbyterian theology.

His tentative writings and, possibly more important, his plans to study in Germany were abruptly terminated by the outbreak of war. He returned briefly in 1863 to writing poems (inspired mainly by his love for Virginia Hankins) and to translating lyrics by Heine and Herder, but in the main, during this lull in his military activities, such literary energy as he could summon forth was devoted to his projected novel, Tiger-Lilies (1867). Somewhat oddly, it is in this prose rather than in his verse that Lanier has his best-sustained image, that of the blood-red flower of war (Book II, chap. 1).

Lanier's work, in this novel as well as in his poetry, is a curious mixture of nineteenth-century thought and antique vocabulary. He was at once a high-hearted if belated Romantic and a devout Medievalist. Shakespeare and Chaucer seemed beyond question the greatest of English poets, if not indeed the greatest of poets. He advised Paul Hamilton Hayne that to develop properly as a poet he must “drink much of Chaucer and little of Morris”; and he made such extensive use of Shakespearean imagery that Aubrey Starke credited him with so developing “the use of the Shakespearean imagery in description of nature as to develop what is almost a distinct genre” (p. 283).

In spite of his fascination with medievalism and his late, symbolic use of Bishop Aldhelm as “the Father of English Poetry,” he belonged essentially to his own time. To Lanier, poetry had improved primarily by becoming more ethereal, more spirit-like. This seemed good; it led him at times, rather disconcertingly, to place Tennyson above Milton: “To discover the process of spiritualization which poetry has undergone, one has only to compare Tennyson with Milton. … Milton's is the strength of the sea in its rage; Tennyson's is the potential force of the sea in its repose” (V, 296-297).

Closely allied with his theory that as time flows on “sensuous things constantly etherealize” was his concept of metaphor. It was true that a metaphor was “always a union of two objects,” but he also believed that metaphors “come of love rather than of thought.” One object was normally abstract, the other concrete, so that the “nature-metaphor is a beautiful eternal bridal of spirit and matter … this harmonious union of soul and body, of spirit and nature, of essence and form, is promoted by the nature-metaphor” (V, 306-321).

It was not poetic theories but Reconstruction that aroused him to an authentic if brief lyricism. The best of these poems, “The Raven Days,” states with precise power the hopelessness of men who felt themselves betrayed into such “hatred and bitterness as even the four terrible years of war had entirely failed to bring about.” The poem ends with a question: will these dark raven days of sorrow be replaced by a warm light that will “gleam across the mournful plain?” More complex in structure and therefore indirect in statement is “Night and Day.” Othello personifies night, but he also stands for the Civil War and for Reconstruction; the dark Moor (night) has murdered Desdemona (day), and at the same time he (as the dual strife of warfare and of reconstruction) has slain peace—and Lanier could see little hope that the “Star-memories of happier times” would soon return to his harassed region. The Shakespearian imagery is not merely a literary device; it is integral to the meaning of the poem (I, 15, 160).

Intermittently in the period from 1868 through 1874, Lanier devoted much of his poetic time and thought to a projected “novel in verse, with several lyric poems introduced by the action. The plot is founded on what was called ‘the Jacquerie,’ a very remarkable popular insurrection which happened in France about the year 1359, in the height of Chivalry” (VII, 397). This never-completed work was meant to be an attack on trade and a plea for the restoration of chivalry; from the surviving fragments, it seems unlikely that it would ever have become his magnum opus. But one lyric deserves to rank with his best: “The Hound was cuffed, the hound was kicked.” The revolting peasants are symbolized by the hound which kills its master, and for once Lanier works entirely through his image. It is necessary to know the first twenty-four lines of the narrative for the lyric to become clear, but with this background the clean-cut imagery reinforces the tragic situation (see IX, 121-122).

An intensely personal poem, “Life and Song” (first entitled, significantly, “Work and Song”) describes the ideal union of life and art, a fusion that would result in wholeness. Indirectly, the poem expresses a bitter realization that Lanier himself, in those poverty-stricken, troubled days, could not attain this harmony. The affirmation of faith in poetry and music is curiously balanced, yet enriched, by the note of personal renunciation (I, 16).

These seem the best of his early lyrics. Aubrey Starke (p. 147) preferred “Nirvâna,” reading into Lanier's quest for spiritual contentment an epithalamium for Mary Day Lanier: “marriage to her more than anything else in his life brought to Lanier the enraptured ecstasy and the sense of escape from the terrors of contemporary events which he so subtly conveys to us in this poem.” This is an attractive reading, although it hardly jibes with Lanier's explanation to Virginia Hankins that “Of course it is a rapt Hindu who speaks” (I, 335). But the erroneous conception of Nirvâna as the “Highest Paradise of Buddha, attainable only by long contemplation, and by perfect superiority to all passions of men and all vicissitudes of Time” (instead of a state of non-existence) has proved a stumbling-block to many readers. Possibly the didactic, declamatory tone harms it even more as a poem (I, 19-21).

The most popular of his early poems was “Thar's More in the Man than Thar Is in the Land,” published in the Macon Telegraph and Messenger, February 7, 1871, and widely though often anonymously reprinted. It is written in the dialect of a Georgia Cracker, and it has humorous overtones and poetic trickeries (Lanier rhymes hum- with cum and sum, and begins the next line with Ble). But the poem is fundamentally serious. It was in fact the best of several dialect poems using the thesis that a plantation economy based on cotton had harmed if not ruined the South financially, and that the region must change the pattern to one of small farms and diversified agriculture. Unlike Henry Grady, he did not want an industrialized South; in direct contrast with the early war poems of Henry Timrod, Lanier had no faith in “the snow of Southern summers.” Cotton was a money crop, dependent on trade—and he had come to hate everything connected with his conception of trade. In the narrative poem the Cracker Jones, who “lived pretty much by gittin' of loans,” goes bankrupt first in Georgia and five years later in Texas, but Brown revitalized the run-down, eroded Georgia farm and made it pay by hard work and by planting wheat and corn. Lanier extends the diversification in “The Homestead” (which is not in dialect) to include fruit, cattle, chickens, hogs, and pastures, so that the farm becomes almost self-sustaining. But the major symbol of this diversification, in his mind, was corn, as cotton was the major symbol of the one-crop, money economy (I, 22-23, 25-28).

The poems in Negro dialect were primarily humorous. “The Power of Prayer,” written in collaboration with his brother Clifford, is the story of an old blind Negro and presumably his young granddaughter who mistake for the devil the noise of the first steamboat coming up the Alabama River. When the boat rounds the bend and with diminishing noise proceeds upstream, the old Negro is convinced that through prayer he has foiled “the debble.” There are primitive though authentic religious overtones, but these are subordinated to the humor. The poem was published in Scribner's (which also published the collaborative “Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn”) and widely reprinted, but Lanier was doubtful of the validity of dialect poetry. He wrote to Charlotte Cushman: “Tell me, ought one to be a little ashamed of writing a dialect poem?” Although Fred L. Pattee called him “a pioneer in a rich field,” he seems to have abandoned dialect with a feeling of relief (I, 215-217).

Perhaps these poems should have freed Lanier from his fondness for archaic and sentimentalized phraseology. They did not. Instead, his growing absorption in music led to a discontent with conventional rhythm and meter. When in March, 1874, he sent his wife “My Two Springs,” he apparently was content with such phrases as “And homeloves and high glory-loves / And science-loves and story-loves,” and in the last stanza he reduces the otherwise excellent imagery by explicitly describing the springs as the eyes of Mary Day Lanier. His discontent took another form: “since I have written it to print, I cannot make it such as I desire in artistic design; for the forms of to-day require a certain trim smugness and clean-shaven propriety in the face and dress of a poem, and I must win a hearing by conforming in some degree to these tyrannies, with a view to overturning them in the future” (I, 32-34; IX, 39-40).

His first rather mild attempt was in the Pindaric or Cowleyan ode, “Corn.” The lines are of irregular lengths, but the prevailing pattern is iambic, and most lines fall into normal two-feet to five-feet accentual lengths; ordinarily, three consecutive lines have perfect end-rhymes, usually monosyllabic, but these triple rhymes are carefully interspersed with contrasting rhyming couplets. “Corn” represents an advance in his command of metrical effects to some extent in a freer, more easily flowing verse, but primarily in a longer, sustained, unified effort.

The structure of the poem has less unity. His friend Logan E. Bleckley complained that Lanier presented four landscapes, the first two in an Italian vein and painted “with the utmost delicacy and finish. … When you paint in Dutch or Flemish you are clear and strong, but sometimes hard.” William Dean Howells in rejecting it for the Atlantic thought it was basically two poems but that “neither was striking enough to stand alone” (both quoted in Starke, p. 189). There is some justice in these statements. The poem begins with the poet wandering through a forest and describing the beauties of the trees and the undergrowth, although there is also a hint of his developing pantheism and fondness for personification in the lines, “I pray with mosses, ferns and flowers shy / That hide like gentle nuns from human eye / To lift adoring perfumes to the sky.” The poet wanders to a zigzag fence separating the forest and a cornfield; he takes an aesthetic delight in its beauty: “without theft, I reap another's field.” One tall stalk of corn is completely out of line; again personifying, Lanier reads into this “corn-captain” a kinship with the poet. The stalk is rooted in earth, yet reaches toward heaven; similarly, the poet should be rooted in the local and the particular, but should give to other men universal values by marrying the new and the old, by uniting earth and heaven, and by reconciling the hot and the cold, the dark and the bright in human lives.

Then Lanier shifts to his harshest direct attack on cotton as symbolic of agricultural trade. Cotton has been responsible for soil erosion; worse, it has been responsible for unstable, discontented lives. The cotton farmer is a “foolish Jason on a treacherous sea, / Seeking the Fleece and finding misery.” Instead of secure, self-contained farming, he “staked his life on games of Buy-and-Sell, / And turned each field into a gambler's hell,” until he became a “gamester's catspaw and a banker's slave.”

The final section is addressed to the eroded old hill. Once again, Lanier's indifference to the logic of his images is only too readily discernible, along with his fondness for literary personifications. The hill becomes a “gashed and hairy Lear,” but his daughter Cordelia becomes the rejuvenating, pitying Spring. Perhaps Lanier considered this a union of matter and spirit, but it seems at best a strange yoking-together of a father and daughter. Spring and corn will revitalize the worn-out land. Perhaps Lanier thought of corn as symbolic of diversified farming; perhaps he oversimplified because of the beauty of the cornfield; but within the framework of the concluding section there is no hint that corn by itself will not enrich eroded land (I, 34-39).

In spite of defects in structure and in logical development, “Corn” remains the first of Lanier's major poems. The forest and the cornfield are vividly described, the attack on cotton sharp and readable. The nature-personifications are effective, although they only indicate a way that Lanier was to explore more fully in later works. When “Corn” was published in Lippincott's Magazine (February, 1875) and enthusiastically praised by the discerning Gilbert Peacock, it justifiably earned for Lanier a reputation as a poet of national importance.

In 1875 he wrote and published in Lippincott's one of his most ambitious poems, “The Symphony.” The title may be an unfortunate one. It has led various commentators to object that the poem does not have the form of a symphony, thus implying that Lanier failed to achieve his objective. This is a misreading. The poem is meant to be a part (not all) of a performance or rehearsal; rarely, and then only for a few consecutive lines, does the entire orchestra play together. It is mainly a series of solo performances, by six different instruments.

As he noted, the poem treated “various deep social questions of the time,” and it had in the writing taken possession of him “like a real James River Ague” (IX, 182). But the work was no hasty improvisation; on the contrary, it was carefully wrought and its effect premeditated. For the first time Lanier attempted freely to make words do the work of music. Drawing on a Shakespearean sonnet for an allusion, he noted that “In my ‘Symphony’ Love's fine wit—the love of one's fellow-men—attempts (not to hear with eyes, but precisely the reverse) to see with ears” (IX, 319). For this purpose he used many and varying devices of versification. In the opening section, the prevailing four-beat iambic line is broken with short lines, one with a truncated foot: “Trade is trade.” There is a skilful use of two- and three-line end-rhymes, but there is also an occasional use of internal rhymes. More noticeable, and reflecting his recent study of Anglo-Saxon poetry, is the heavy monotone of alliteration. Both of these can be illustrated by one couplet:

Of what avail the rigorous tale
Of bill for coin and box for bale?

(I, 46)

Later in the poem, when the knight promises to do battle for the lady, Lanier uses the form of a traditional medieval song, with its insistent refrain of “Fair Lady.” The concluding sections contrast with this fixed pattern by their deliberate irregularity. He declared that he had “dared almost to write quite at my ease in the matters of rhythm, rhyme, and substance, in this poem,” and he had largely succeeded (IX, 203).

In spite of the intricate metrical effects, Lanier seems to have been even more interested in the message than in the form. Yet the subject is not simple, but complicated with a series of related and intertwined ideas. The primary one, an attack on trade and materialism, had obsessed him since he had started struggling with “The Jacquerie,” seven or eight years earlier. There is also a statement of his newly found belief that God reveals himself through nature, and this revelation must be translated for most men not through the Church but through art: “Where Nature spreads her wild blue sky / For Art to make into melody!” More clearly stated is the demand for a restoration of chivalry in the world. But the overriding message, not in fact economic, is for a broader and deeper human love, supported by a more intense, deeply felt (if unorthodox) religion.

The poem develops through personifications. The violins and, quickly, the other strings, personify art; the flute, nature; the clarionet, the lady; the horn, the knight; the hautboy, the child (almost equated with Christ); the concluding bassoons, wise old age. The violins begin the attack on trade, but immediately suggest Lanier's metaphysical solution: “O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead! / The time needs heart—'tis tired of head.” Love has been overcome by greed that has degenerated into swinehood at the expense of humanity. Men have for too long disregarded Christ's words, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” For trade has no mercy. The mistreated and the underpaid can easily be replaced, since the poor are prolific. Trade has become only “war grown miserly,” but the solution is not in economics but in love: “Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it; / Plainly the heart of a child could solve it.”

After a brief interlude by the orchestra, the flute is introduced with what seems to me Lanier's finest, best-sustained poetic image:

                    But presently
A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
Upon the bosom of that harmony,
And sailed and sailed incessantly,
As if a petal from a wild-rose blown
Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone
And boatwise dropped o' the convex side
And floated down the glassy tide
And clarified and glorified
The solemn spaces where the shadows bide.

(I, 48-49)

The flute states precisely its own function in the poem: “I hold / Full powers from Nature manifold” to speak for the great and the small, for the “no-tonguèd tree,” the lichens, mosses, ferns. This power extends also to animate birds, animals, and insects, and even to the sound of the wind through the trees. The flute holds that man had once been in harmony with nature, but this equilibrium had been upset in ancient times by false mythologies and pagan religions—“cold creatures of man's colder brain.” This separation from true nature continued until Christ proclaimed “Love thy neighbor. … All men are neighbors.” Then men briefly could understand nature and be at peace with mountains, rivers, trees, and with each other. But trade had again distorted this harmonious relationship, and it could be restored again only through love.

The clarionet blames trade for debasing the purity of womanhood and introducing prostitution into the world, and the horn promises through the revivification of chivalry to restore her to her rightful place in the world. As trade has warped our relations with religion and with nature, so it has warped our relations with each other. The hautboy, speaking for the child, quotes Christ after introductory words that suggest Lanier had given up his earlier faith in Christ's divinity: “Once said a Man—and wise was He— / Never shalt thou the heavens see, / Save as a little child thou be.”

The bassoons conclude the poem. Life itself is like a fugue, from birth to death (east to west), but the musical score is not freshly made; it is a continuum with “harsh half-phrasings, / Blotted ere writ,” a “weltering palimpsest” dimly recording all that has gone before. Only through love can the discords be resolved. As early as Tiger-Lilies Lanier had written that “Music means harmony, harmony means love, and love means—God” (V, 31). At the end of “The Symphony” he returned to that theme. Drawing on his belief that man and nature steadily etherealize, he closed on a note of optimism, with an allusion to the biblical flood: “O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: / Music is Love in search of a word” (I, 46-56).

“The Symphony” won him new friends in Philadephia, most notably Bayard Taylor. Mainly through the intercession of Taylor, Lanier was commissioned to write the verses for a cantata to be sung at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the music to be composed by Dudley Buck. Although Taylor cautioned him to “make the lines simple and strong” and to make the poem representative rather than individualistic, Lanier disregarded his advice. As a musician himself, he felt that he had “to compose for the musician as well as the country” not in clearly stated lines but in “broad bands of color” (IX, 297). The poem, entitled “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia,” celebrates America as a haven for those oppressed by religious or economic tyranny; names like Mayflower, Plymouth, Jamestown, Puritan, and Huguenot become in themselves symbols. There are eight contrasting stanzas in words mainly of Saxon derivation, beginning with the early difficulties of colonization and concluding with “the Triumph of the Republic over the opposing powers of nature and of man.” Although he complained that limitations of space allowed him to devote only one line each to the philosophies of art, science, power, government, faith, and social life, he thought that he had made it “absolutely free from all melodramatic artifice, and wholly simple and artless” (II, 271; IX, 300, 311, 353).

When the poem was published without the music, it was immediately attacked as obscure and vague, with archaic words and stilted hyphenations, as in the lines “Toil when wild brother-wars new-dark the Light, / Toil, and forgive, and kiss o'er, and replight.” Lanier defended the work vigorously: it was meant to be sung rather than to be read. He felt vindicated when, sung by a chorus of eight hundred voices to the accompaniment of one hundred and fifty instruments, the cantata was a dramatic success (I, 60-62).

Lippincott's commissioned Lanier to write a centennial ode for its July, 1876, issue. “Psalm of the West” is his longest complete poem, but it is also his most disjointed one. There is some excuse. It was written hurriedly, at a time when he was ill. Yet the good qualities in the poem are typical of Lanier, and so are the defects. As Aubrey Starke has noted (p. 248), Lanier had attempted “to compose a poem which should carry or create its own musical accompaniment.” The beginning is conventional enough. America is the “Tall Adam of Lands, new-made of the dust of the West,” from whose side Eve (Freedom) is carved. It is freedom that gives power to friendship, marriage, law, and other human attributes:

And Science be known as the sense making love to the All,
And Art be known as the soul making love to the All,
And Love be known as the marriage of man with the All.

(I, 63)

God will help this All-lover, the prophet and poet, the “lark of the dawn,” by revealing to him the past and the future. Disregarding the Indians, Lanier celebrates in a ballad-like interlude the coming of the Norsemen, and in eight Miltonic sonnets the first voyage of Columbus (cast in the form of a dramatic monologue and narrated by Columbus himself). After the discovery, the colonization is symbolized in the poem by the Mayflower, and the war for independence is worked mainly around the battle at Lexington. Lanier notes in passing that Jefferson had told “the rights of man to men” and that “Deep-rooted Washington” had won final success at Yorktown. In his haste, and perhaps also because he did not wish to mar the unified nationalistic tone of the ode by discussing the issues and differences involved, Lanier incorporated a much earlier poem as an allegory of the Civil War. If “The Tournament: Joust First” was written, as Charles Anderson thinks, in 1865 as a peace-offering to the estranged Mary Day, this conflict between heart and brain may have been appropriate; as an allegory of the war, it is both absurd and insipid. Wisely, Lanier hastens on to the prophecy, as revealed by the artist's God: in this reunited land freedom will drive out the beasts of war, oppression, murder, lust, false art, and false faith (I, 62-82).

“Psalm of the West” is not a philosophical poem, but a series of pen-pictures that its author thought to be representative and tried to make symbolic. He succeeded best with the sonnet sequence. But he failed to impose an artistic unity on his diverse, unconnected forms and incidents, and his enthusiastic paean of over-optimistic prophecy is difficult to read seriously. But the poem solidified his reputation. This was further consolidated when later that year Lippincott issued in book form ten of his poems that had appeared in Lippincott's Magazine, including “Corn,” “The Symphony,” and “Psalm.”

Temporarily abandoning his theories of musical versification, Lanier wrote in blank verse a long poem, “Clover.” It embodied his artistic creed, and he later planned to use it as the title poem of a projected volume. It grew, he wrote, “out of a mood of solemn protest against the doctrine of ‘Art for Art's Sake,’ which has led so many of our young artists into the most unprofitable and even blasphemous activities” (IX, 398, n. 135). But it grew also out of his wrathful memories of the attacks on the Centennial Cantata, and he twice gives a list of fellow-artists who had likewise been mistreated: Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, and Buddha. As the materialistic ox destroys the clover, so the Course-of-things destroys the artist. Only faith that we are all part of God's plan will save us, with the realization that “The artist's market is the heart of man.” It is a troubled, uneven poem, yet it is easy to see why Lanier overvalued it (I, 84-87).

That same year he wrote the most beautiful of the many lyrics to his wife, “Evening Song” (set to music by Dudley Buck under the title “Sunset”). Lanier's love poems rarely measure up to his best lyrics, but this dainty, tranquil poem is an exception. However, Lanier's poetic well was, temporarily, almost dry. Of the poems written in 1877, only two can be considered even reasonably successful. In “The Stirrup-Cup,” death becomes a rare cordial handed to the horseman just before he sets out on a long journey. The appropriate metaphor, the literary allusions, and the gallant courage of a sick man willing to drink the “rich stirrup-cup … right smilingly” give the lyric an enduring if somewhat personalized appeal. The second poem is more important and has become his best-known poem. The “Song of the Chattahoochee” marks Lanier's extreme use of personification, for, throughout, the river is the narrator; the onomatopoeia and the heavy use of the refrain testify to Poe's continuing influence; and the interlocking vowel and consonant sounds, the alliteration, and the internal rhymes indicate a desire for musicality at the expense of idea. The poem does have a lulling motion that has a narcotic effect on many readers. But the objection that the personification is a pathetic fallacy overlooks the fact that only this justifies Lanier in giving the Chattahoochee a moral duty to water the fields and turn the mills, before it at last becomes a part of the ocean (I, 88, 90, 103-104).

Lanier had become increasingly fascinated with the running or logaoedic dactyllic measure, which in his definition allowed a free admixture of iambics and spondees. “The Revenge of Hamish” he considered frankly “an experiment” in this meter (X, 72). The subject was derived practically without change from Chapter 2 of William Black's novel, MacLeod of Dare; the four-line stanza form and the rhyme scheme of this narrative poem suggest the medieval ballad, but the long, looping lines, the free meter, and varying rhythms are Lanier's own additions. It is a quick-moving, interesting story in verse of a brutal punishment and an even more brutal revenge, but it is quite uncharacteristic of Lanier's other poetry (I, 112-116).

Time spent in or near Brunswick, Georgia, alongside the Marshes of Glynn, revived his poetic imagination. He planned a series of Hymns of the Marshes, to be either a separate book or combined with related (and mainly unwritten) Hymns of the Fields and Hymns of the Mountains. Easily the best of these—in fact, his best long poem—is “The Marshes of Glynn.” The form illustrates an even freer use than in “The Revenge” of the logaoedic dactyl—so free that at times the pattern disappears, ranging from the prevailing pentameter rhyming couplets to a one-syllabled line. It is also the most intricate musically, for as Norman Foerster has perceptively pointed out,² it is “not one melody artfully varied, but a bewildering succession of winding and darting melodies.” The effect is orchestral rather than harmonic. Lanier begins with the feeling of ecstasy aroused by the live oaks and the marshes; he almost equates the oak with the Holy Ghost, as he was to equate the marsh with what he could accept of the primal beginning in the theory of evolution. It is evening, but he has secured a spiritual release from the finite world:

Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
          Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
          And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
          And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore.

(I, 119)

In the enormously long first sentence, nature personified in the live oak is good, the essence of spiritual comfort; trade and finite time are evil. To the east is the ocean, to Lanier a symbol of infinity; in the east, also, was the beginning of the world. The recognition of this gives him faith, and a new-found freedom from doubt. The marsh now seems to him like the catholic man who has won “God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain / And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.”

In another of his curiously mixed metaphors in which he tried to weld together the concrete and the abstract, Lanier continues: “As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, / Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.” This simile, widely and disconcertingly praised by many high school teachers, is the low point in the poem. Fortunately, Lanier soon recovers from this illogical sentimentality. The incoming tide serves a triple purpose: literally, the ocean floods the marsh, but figuratively the infinite floods the finite, and thus floods the soul of man so that he attains union with God. Yet the poem ends on a note of doubt. The high tide brings with it night and sleep, with its suggestion of death:

But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shades that creep
                    Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.

(I, 122)

This probing into the subconscious is uncharacteristic; so, too, is the element of doubt. “The Marshes of Glynn” is the final complete poem in the sequence. He planned to open the Hymns with “Sunrise” (written later), but it seems unlikely that he intended to close on this note. There is no way to know, but I am convinced that one of his most complete “Poem Outlines” (I, 276) at least indicates the direction the concluding poem would have taken:

The courses of the wind, and the shifts thereof, as also what way the clouds go; and that which is happening a long way off; and the full face of the sun; and the bow of the Milky Way from end to end; as also the small, the life of the fiddler-crab, and the household of the marsh-hen; yea, and more, the translation of black ooze into green blade of marshgrass, which is as if filth bred heaven:

This a man seeth upon the marsh.

That the marsh had become a symbol in his mind of the condition from which man had developed (not evolved) is indicated by a passage in a letter about another poem in the sequence: “For whatever can be proved to have been evolved, evolution seems to me a noble and beautiful and true theory. But a careful search has not shown me a single instance … of an actual case of species differentiation” (X, 205).

A man was free to make his own choices; he was not a biological pawn in a predetermined game. In fact, Lanier was developing a theory of opposing forces in nature. All the motions in nature resulted from this opposition or antagonism of forces, and from this opposition came rhythm. This seemed to justify his belief in a freer form for poetry and music; following Herbert Spencer's First Principles, he believed evolution to be “a process from the uniform and indefinite to the multiform and definite.” It did not justify formlessness: he quoted with approval and worked changes on the aphorism of the poet Hervé that “He who will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks.” Aubrey Starke has neatly phrased Lanier's principle of opposition as “Form against Chaos, of Good against Evil, of Love against Selfishness, of Design against Accident, of Belief against Scepticism” (p. 372). This “fundamental principle of creation” he embodied in the poem “Opposition.” It is through the conquest of these adverse forces that man's will, his moral sense, and his art develop:

Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
                              Complain no more; for these, O Heart,
Direct the random of the will
                              As rhymes direct the rage of art.

(I, 130-131)

It is an abstractly philosophical idea which Lanier developed in The Science of English Verse, but which he nowhere stated more appealingly than in this lyric.

Although he shied away from theology, Lanier's mind was engrossed by religious problems. Out of this preoccupation came the long, humorless poem “The Crystal,” with its odd spectacle of a minor poet forgiving, among many others, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. True, this recognition of their fallibility leads up to the infallibility and perfection of Christ the man. It is Lanier's clearest statement that he had come to regard Christ as symbol of divinity, but not divine. The conflict in his mind between religion and science resulted in the kindred poem “The Cloud,” with its strong affirmation that while a cloud might be evolved, an artist could not be: he was a free and responsible being, yet answerable to himself, to mankind, and to God for the work he produced. The earlier title, “Individuality,” better describes the idea that Lanier stressed; apparently he changed the title when he decided to incorporate the poem into the “Hymns of the Marshes” (I, 136-141).

He was to write two more magnificent lyrics, and a long, fevered poem. “Marsh Song—at Sunset” depends on a reasonable familiarity with The Tempest, but once again, as in “Night and Day,” the Shakespearean imagery serves as a springboard to lead to his essential idea. It is an Ariel-cloud and a Caliban-sea, but it is not the brother or the man Antonio who has injured Prospero; rather, it is Antonio as man who has committed the injustice, and it is man in general (not a specific person) who must be pardoned. He followed this with the quickly written, intricately musical “Ballad of Trees and the Master.” Ironically, with apparently no attention to what it says, the poem is included in a Methodist hymnal, and frequently sung. For it is Lanier's finest yet most extreme statement that God reveals himself to man not through the church but through nature. On the eve of his crucifixion, a disturbed and “forspent” Christ goes into the woods, and it is the olive trees that console Christ and give him strength to endure his ordeal. Like the live oak in “The Marshes of Glynn,” the trees become synonymous with the Holy Spirit. It is Lanier's most beautiful lyric, one that we could not easily spare from our scant number of nearly perfect poems (I, 142, 144).

He had no chance to revise his last poem, “Sunrise.” He intended it to be the first poem in “Hymns of the Marshes,” and it is properly optimistic about the place man has attained in the world. Before he awakes, the poet is conscious of three major symbols: the live oak, the marsh, and the main. The live oak brings God to man; the marsh is that from which man has evolved; and the ocean is immortality. In this sense the marsh is indeed a “Reverend Marsh,” a menstruum that dissolves and re-creates all matter. But a fourth major symbol, even more important than the earlier three, is added. The sun is equated with Christ; it is the life-giving force that makes the “sacramental marsh one pious plain.” Before the rising of the sun there is the quiet stillness of dawn, the “ante-reign of Mary Morning.” Then the sun, rising, gives to man a strength that even the live oak can not give: “I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun.” And the sun more even than the main gives us conviction of immortality: after death, “yonder besides thee / My soul shall float, friend Sun, / The day being done.” It was the last, fitting testament of an unorthodox but deeply religious man (I, 144-149).

Any re-evaluation of Lanier as poet might well start with his admitted weaknesses. These can be listed briefly: (1) a strong tendency toward moralizing and didacticism, sometimes combined with an excessive, lushly-phrased sentimentalism, especially when these elements are not part of the texture of the poem but are added rather obtrusively; (2) a frequent use of over-fervid rhetoric as a substitute for imagination, as in the Sun-Bee passage in “Sunrise”; (3) a strained imagery that grew out of his desire to yoke together in one metaphor the concrete and the abstract; (4) the use of archaic words and constructions that, although characteristic of his thought, give a quaint, artificial character to many poems.

Such handicaps are severe. Yet they do not ruin, even if they do vitiate, his positive accomplishment. The best of the long poems have sufficient intellectual and philosophical content and enough musical form to lift them above their inherent defects. At their best, they have also a strong sense of locale, derived from exact and sympathetic observation. “Corn” is a spirited economic protest against the agricultural money-crop cotton, and a strong plea for diversified agriculture; the description of the woods and of the cornfield is what Lanier had seen closely with his own eyes before he turned the raw matter into poetry. On a wider base, “The Symphony” is both an economic and a social protest; one may not agree with the idea that trade (materialism) inevitably debases or that nature etherealizes, but certainly there is no lack of valid subject matter. Yet it is as a religious poet that Lanier in his longer poems is at his best. All four are loosely constructed, and marred by rhetorical flourishes and illogical images. But the disordered though powerful “Sunrise” and the magnificent “Marshes of Glynn” express Lanier's mature religious belief: God is immanent, and He reveals himself to us through nature, in the ferns, the streams, the marsh, the trees, and the sun. When he complained that Poe did not know enough “to be a great poet,” Lanier was not thinking of practical or scholarly knowledge, but of that intuitive comprehension by which a poet converts learning into wisdom (II, 6; VII, 94-96). This was what he attempted to do, and in “The Marshes of Glynn” he largely succeeded.

These faults cannot be found in a handful of his best lyrics. The early poems (“Night and Day,” “Raven Days,” “Life and Song,” and one or two dialect poems) are simpler but not necessarily poorer than the later lyrics. He had not yet begun, in theory and in practice, to loosen the structure of English versification. As he developed, he found it hampering and nearly impossible to stay within a rigid framework: except for the Columbus sonnets in “Psalm of the West” and possibly “The Harlequin of Dreams,” he wrote no sonnets that are comparable to those of Longfellow, Boker, and Hayne. He preferred to depend on musical cadence and a trained ear rather than on accent or rhythm; at times he may have carried this over into artifice, as in “Song of the Chattahoochee,” but at his best (“Evening Song,” “Marsh Song,” and above all, “Ballad of Trees”) he wrote some of the finest lyrics in American poetry.

          It is a thin sheaf of authentic poetry that we can salvage from the
occasional and the sentimental, but it remains an authentic one.
Lanier never attained his goal of writing major poetry, but he pro-
                    duced a small number of poems that have never received
                                                  the recognition they deserve. He is one of
                                                            our most vital and most interesting
                                                                                                    minor poets.

Notes

1. Centennial Edition of the Works and Letters of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson et al. (10 vols.; Baltimore, 1945), V, 260. Hereinafter cited internally by volume and page number. References to Aubrey H. Starke's Sidney Lanier (Chapel Hill, 1933) will be given as Starke, followed by the page number; when Starke is clearly identified, only the page number will be given.

2. Nature in American Literature (New York, 1923), p. 235.