Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) was an American poet and musician, born in Macon, Georgia. He served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and was captured and imprisoned, an experience that permanently damaged his health. He worked as first flautist with the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore and lectured on English literature at Johns Hopkins University while developing a theory of poetry as a form of music, applied in poems such as "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Song of the Chattahoochee." He died of tuberculosis at thirty-nine.