Book Description
1909. With a memorial by William Hayes Ward. A posthumous volume of the poems of Sidney Lanier, poet, critic, and musician, whose Civil War experiences made the remainder of his life a battle against time, poverty, and ill health. He was noted for his theory that the laws of music and poetry are identical and both based upon the physics of sound: duration, intensity, pitch, and tone color.Download Description
Shall self-wrapt husbands aye forget Kiss-pardons for the daily fret Wherewith sweet wifely eyes are wet-- Blind to lips kiss-wise set-- Fair Lady? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An invaluable reprint of the 1916 edition.
This is an invaluable reprint of the 1916 edition of Mary Lanier's 1884 collection, which is only marred by a certain over-solicitousness for the poet's fame that depreciates the early poems and the jolly, Twainy "dialect" poems, whice rise to Frost in "Thar's more in the Man than thar is in the Land."

Sidney Lanier saw the Real through "Christ's crystal" clear as the great fourth stanza of "Song of the Chattahoochee":

And oft in the hills of Habersham,
And oft in the valleys of Hall,
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
And many a luminous jewel lone
---Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet and amethyst---
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
In the beds of the valleys of Hall.

"A Florida Sunday" is an evocation pure as any of Florida, and there is homesickness in "From the Flats":

Oh might I through these tears
But glimpse some hill my Georgia high uprears,
Where white the quartz and pink the pebble shine,
The hickory heavenward strives, the muscadine
Swings o'er the slope, the oak's far-falling shade
Darkens the dogwood in the bottom glade,
And down the hollow from a ferny nook
Bright leaps a living brook!

The famous "Hymns of the Marshes" are what Georgia is like, so that when in "Ireland" he offers against the famine "the main and cordial current of our love," he prophesies Finnegans Wake.

Hart Crane's noble tribute to "Psalm of the West", Pound's rare salute to "A Ballad of Trees and the Master", bespeak a poet loudly ignored.

His great Cantata for the Centennial would serve as well in 1976.

In his Afterword, John Hollander points to "the opening line of 'The Marshes of Glynn,' when separated from the weaker, rhyming second one: 'Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven'; here again we feel that the music of Lanier's verse lies closer to the ebb and flow of Whitman's than to the brilliant contraptions of Swinburne's."That second line is, "With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven"---go on to the third, "Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs," and you have Lanier.

An 19th Century Materpiece!
Sidney Lanier was perhaps the greatest poet produced by the South during the the 19th Century.His descriptions of the nature and the Georgian Marshes of Glen, as in "the slant yellow beam of the sun doth seemlike a lane from Heaven that leads to a dream..." and "beliefovermasters doubt and I know that I know..." are words that feed thesoul with the timeless nector of wisdom and humanity.I treasure this bookand any student of the American South and/or of American Poetry will findMr. Lanier's style of alliteration and assonance, together with hiswonderful imagery to be a feast for the soul in solitude. ... Read more