Know Your Poets: Sidney Lanier

In western civilization, poetry has long been considered the most artful form of the written word. As classical educators, there’s very little we can do that deepens our appreciation of words and their power more than dedication to great poetry and poets. The “Know Your Poets” series will tell the life story of various poets while also introducing the nature and themes of their work.

But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall
Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call —
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o’er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.

–The Song of the Chattahoochee, Sidney Lanier

Little remembered or appreciated, Sidney Lanier’s brilliance is eclipsed by his importance as a symbol of the struggle in the Reconstruction Era South. He is best remembered for his progressive southern voice in the Reconstruction South, but he also wrote many memorable lyrical romantic poems, as well as one novel and many literary essays. 

Sidney Clopton Lanier was born February 3, 1842 in Macon, Georgia, to a middle class family. At fourteen, he enrolled at Oglethorpe University where it became clear he was naturally gifted in the arts, specifically music. When he graduated, he was generally recognized as the most talented musician in the state of Georgia.

In addition to his growth in the arts, at Oglethorpe Lanier also gained a sincere appreciation for science and rigorous scholarship. Lanier, in those years, expressed a tension between his aspirations for academic attainment and his natural ability to make music. He felt that music was not a weighty enough endeavor to be worth committing his life to; he thought he was called to more. In an effort to find a harmony between his desires, he decided that he wanted to follow the path of other serious literary scholars and study romantic poetry in Germany. 

Before he was able to depart, the South fired on Fort Sumter initiating the American Civil War. Almost to a man, the entire student body of Oglethorpe enlisted in the Confederate army, including Lanier. Even though his plans to study overseas had been ruined by the war, he never lost his personal zeal for knowledge and continued to study literature, specifically the German romantics, while fighting in the war. 

In 1864, the blockade-runner that Lanier had been transferred to was captured by Union forces, and he, along with the rest of the crew, was taken to Point Lookout Prison. He purchased his freedom four months later with gold that another inmate had smuggled into the camp, but was so ill on release that he immediately returned home to Georgia. Ultimately, Lanier would never fully recover from the tuberculosis that he contracted while in prison. His poor health plagued him till his death nineteen years later. 

Most men met by the same circumstances would have been fortunate to escape the war with their life and with some means to provide for a family in the devastated post-war South. In fact, Lanier echoed this sentiment in a letter to a friend, “Perhaps you know that with us of the younger generation of the South, since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying.” But Lanier did more than merely survive. For the following nine years, Lanier struggled to piece together a living as a hotel attendant, tutor, and lawyer, but his poetic voice would not be silenced; he continued to study poetry and music, even publishing his first novel, Tiger Lilies. 

In 1873, he moved to Baltimore and accepted a position as first flute in the Peabody Orchestra. For the first time, Lanier was a paid artist. By 1876, after three years of full time work in music and publishing a few important poems, he realized that as much as he loved music, his career had to be literary. His interest in music, however, continued to pervade his literary work as evidenced by his lyrical approach to poetry. This realization coincided with a downturn in Lanier’s health, and he was forced to quit the orchestra and leave Baltimore in search of a better climate.  

In 1878, he returned to Baltimore and committed himself to full time scholarly study of English literature and poetry, attempting to make up the education he had missed because of the war. As a result of his studies, he earned a position as lecturer at John Hopkins University. He held this position for three years before finally succumbing to Tuberculosis while visiting family after a particularly harsh Baltimore winter. 

Though he never achieved the literary greatness of someone like Walt Whitman (the only other Civil War soldier to have a nationally recognized poetic voice), Lanier’s life symbolizes the reality of the deplorable post-bellum conditions in the South, but also how beauty managed to transcend the obstacles of human chaos.