Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia. The son of a lawyer, Lanier was raised in the traditions of the Old South. He read widely in his father’s library before entering Oglethorpe College, where he began to seriously study both music (he was an amateur flautist) and poetry. In 1860, Lanier joined the Confederate Army. He served with the Macon Volunteers until he was captured and imprisoned by the Union Army. While being held in prison, Lanier contracted tuberculosis. The disease eventually killed him at age 39.

During his lifetime, Lanier published a novel about his war experiences, Tiger Lilies (1867), as well as a collection of poems, a series of adventure stories for children, and a work of criticism. His Poems (1877) brought him renown and led to his appointment as lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in 1879. Lanier’s idiosyncratic theories of prosody, laid out in The Science of English Verse (1880), held that poetry and music shared the same underlying structure. While at Hopkins, Lanier also publicly lectured on Shakespeare and the development of the novel. These lectures were gathered in the posthumous publications The English Novel and the Principle of Its Development (1883; revised 1897) and Shakespeare and His Forerunners (1902). Lanier’s wife, Mary Day, edited the collected volume of his poetry, Poems of Sidney Lanier (1884; revised and enlarged 1891, 1916).