Sidney Lanier | Page 4

author of the introduction to the first complete edition of Sidney
Lanier's poems -- published three years after the poet's death --
predicted with confidence that Lanier would "take his final rank with
the first princes of American song." Anticipating the appearance of this
volume, one of the best of recent lyric poets, who had been Lanier's
fellow prisoner during the Civil War, prophesied that "his name to the
ends of the earth would go." Indeed, there was a sense of surprise to
those who had read only the 1877 edition of Lanier's poems, when his
poems were collected in an adequate and worthy edition. Since that
time the space devoted to him in histories of American literature has
increased from ten or twelve lines to as many pages -- an indication at
once of popular interest and of an increasing number of scholars and
critics who have recognized the value of his work. His growing fame
found a notable expression when his picture appeared in the
frontispiece of the standard American Anthology, along with those of
Poe, Walt Whitman, and the five recognized New England poets.
It cannot be said, however, that Lanier's rank as a poet -- even in
American, to say nothing of English literature -- is yet fixed. He is a
very uneven writer, and his defects are glaring. Some of the best
American critics -- men who have a right to speak with authority --
shake their heads in disapproval at what they call the Lanier cult.
Abroad he has had no vogue, as have Emerson and Poe and Walt
Whitman. The enthusiastic praise of the "Spectator" has been more than
balanced by the indifference of some English critics and the sarcasm of
others. Mme. Blanc's article in the "Revue des Deux Mondes", setting
forth the charm of his personality and the excellence of his poetry, met
with little response in France. In view of this divergence of opinion
among critics, it may be doubted if the time has yet come for anything
approaching a final valuation of Lanier's work. In the later pages of this
book an attempt will be made to give a reasonably balanced and critical
study of his actual achievement in poetry and criticism.

Certainly those who have at heart the interest of American poetry
cannot but wage a feud with death for taking away one who had just
begun his career. The words of the great English threnodies over the
premature death of men of genius come involuntarily to one who
realizes what the death of Lanier meant. It is true that he lived fourteen
years longer than Keats and ten years longer than Shelley, and that he
was as old as Poe when he died; but it must be remembered that, so far
as his artistic work was concerned, the period from 1861 to 1873 was
largely one of arrested development. He is one of the inheritors of
unfulfilled renown, not simply because he died young, but because
what he had done and what he had planned to do gave promise of a
much better and more enduring work. Such men as he and Keats must
be judged, to be sure, by their actual achievement; but there will always
attach to their names the glory of the unfulfilled life, a fame out of all
proportion to the work accomplished. Poe had completed his work:
limited in its range, it is all but perfect. Lanier, with his reverence for
science, his appreciation of scholarship, his fine feeling for music, and
withal his love of nature and of man, had laid broad the foundation for
a great poet's career. The man who, at so early an age and in the face of
such great obstacles, wrote the "Marshes of Glynn" and the "Science of
English Verse", and who in addition thereto gave evidence of constant
growth and of self-criticism, would undoubtedly have achieved much
worthier things in the future.
Of one thing there can be no doubt, that his personality is one of the
rarest and finest we have yet had in America, and that his life was one
of the most heroic recorded in the annals of men. The time has passed
for emphasizing unduly the pathos of Lanier's life. He was not a
sorrowful man, nor was his life a sad one. His untimely and all but
tragic death following a life of suffering and poverty, the appeals made
by admirers in behalf of the poet's family, a few letters written to
friends explaining his seeming negligence, and a fragment or two found
in his papers after death, have been sometimes treated without their
proper perspective. A complete reading of his letters -- published and
unpublished -- and of his writings, combined with the reminiscences of
his friends in Baltimore,