The Poems of Sidney Lanier

Reading time: about 4 h
Length: 55,183 words · 238 pages
Structure: 80 chapters · 3 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Victorian

The collected verse of a Confederate veteran turned musician and poet, who built a personal theory of poetry as a form of music and put it to work in poems of the American South — its marshes, its rivers, its unhealed wounds — before tuberculosis, contracted in a wartime prison camp, ended his life at thirty-nine.

Sidney Lanier died in 1881; this posthumous collection, edited by his wife, Mary Day Lanier, was first published in 1884.

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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Sidney Lanier

1842–1881 · Victorian

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.

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