Sidney Clopton Lanier (February 3, 1842 – September 7, 1881) was an American musician and poet.
Sidney Clopton Lanier was born February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia,[2] 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).[3] He suffered greatly from this disease, then incurable and usually fatal, for the rest of his life.
Biography
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 1867 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 style and literary theory
With his theory connecting musical notation with poetic meter, and also being described as a deft metrical technical,[4] in his own words 'daring with his poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style' [5] and also by developing 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, Charlotte Cushman, 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 they knew each other
or that either of them had read any of the other's works).
Lanier also published essays on other literary and musical topics and
a notable series of four redactions of literary works about knightly
combat and chivalry in modernized language more appealing to the boys of
his day:
-The Boy's Froissart (1878), a retelling of Jean Froissart's
Froissart's Chronicles, which tell of adventure, battle and custom in medieval England, France and Spain
-The Boy's King Arthur (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 (1881), based on the early Welsh legends of King Arthur, as retold in the
Red Book of Hergest.
-The Boy's Percy (published posthumously in 1882), consisting of old ballads of war, adventure and love based on Bishop Thomas Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
He also wrote two travelogues that were widely read at the time, entitled Florida: Its Scenery, Climate and History (1875) and Sketches of India (1876) (although he never visited India).