Sidney Lanier in 1967

Abstract

A complete view of the work of Sidney Lanier must show him as a Southerner, an agrarian, a religious poet, and an authority on versification. This dissertation considers him in these four roles. The biographical chapters I through III demonstrate Lanier's personal attachment to the South and the arts. He grew up in Macon, Georgia; spent vacations on his grandfather's estate in Tennessee, was graduated from Oglethorpe College, participated in the war, and married a Southern girl. Although poor health and financial problems distracted him, he turned back on an early law career and devoted his life to music and poetry. Just before his death he served as a successful lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Chapters IV and V deal with Lanier's use of Southern material. A few of his less known poems are intended to be universal; a larger number of carefully done poems are set in Texas, Tennessee, and Florida; his novel, Tiger-Lilies, shows a greater adaptation of the Tennessee setting; but his best work is set in his native Georgia. Lanier's best characters are southern. Although he admitted that every economic-social class contained good and bad members, his ideal was the democratic man, usually a diligent Southern farmer, who takes a direct responsibility for his own life and is not afraid of hard work. Chapters VI through VIII study the three themes developed in Lanier's works: socio-political, religious, and literary. Lanier believed that an ideal economic government was founded on the home and he held an agrarian economy more desirable than an industrial one. Opposed to institutional religion, he defined true religion in terms of love and brotherhood of man. Closely related were his literary ideas based on the moral obligation of the artist to his reader. This attempts to outline a scientific system of versification did much to literate American prosody. Chapters IX through XI trace the general trends in Lanier scholarship from his death in 1881 to 1967. Except for a major biography and a few scholarly essays, early criticism was largely rhapsodic and emotional. Critical articles appearing in 1933-1934 center around Aubrey Starke's biography and consider Lanier as an agrarian. The importance of the sries lies in the fact that it represents his first serious attention from recognized scholars. The definitive edition of Lanier's works was published in 1945. Recent essays evaluate Lanier's contribution to American prosody through his The Science of English Verse. Balanced criticism must see Sidney Lanier as both an innovational prosodist and a Southern poet writing about Southern ideas and peoples in Southern settings.