The answer to this letter, giving a detailed criticism of the poem, was very helpful to Lanier. Judge Bleckley is a man of much cultivation, and is widely known throughout Georgia as at once one of the leading lawyers of the State and a man who can in his leisure moments engage in literary work which, though not published, gives evidence of imagination and taste. Lanier was wise enough to accept most of his criticism: the revised form of the poem compared with the first form shows a great many changes, and is striking evidence of Lanier's power to improve his work. Judge Bleckley's characterization of "Corn" so accurately describes it that his words may be quoted here: "It presents four pictures; three of them landscapes and one a portrait. You paint the woods, a cornfield, and a worn-out hill. These are your landscapes. And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious, unthrifty cotton-planter, who always spends his crop before he has made it, borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year to year, wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West. Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person [the cornstalk is Lanier's symbol of the poet], and you give its poetry with many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence in the distant future."*
— * Quoted in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 61. —
The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", February, 1875, and at once attracted the attention of some discriminating readers of magazines, notably Mr. Gibson Peacock, the editor of the Philadelphia "Evening Bulletin", who reviewed it in a most sympathetic manner, and became one of the poet's best friends during the remainder of his life. It is noteworthy that the scenery of the poem should be so distinctively and realistically Southern. There is in the first part all of Lanier's love of the Southern forest: the shimmering forms in the woods, the leaves, the subtlety of mighty tenderness in the embracing boughs, the long muscadines, the mosses, ferns, and flowers, are all delicately felt and described — with a suggestion of Keats. As he wanders from this forest to the zigzag-cornered fence, his fieldward-faring eyes take in the beauty of the cornfield, "the heaven of blue inwoven with a heaven of green." One tall corn captain becomes to his mind the symbol of the poet-soul sublime, who takes from all that he may give to all. The picture of the thriftless and negligent Southern farmer, "a gamester's cat'spaw and a banker's slave," shows Lanier's keen insight into Southern conditions, which he had, while living in Macon, studied with much care and which he now lifted into the realm of poetry. The red hills of Georgia, deserted and barren, are presented with true pathos. Nevertheless, like a genuine prophet, the poet looks forward to a better day: —
Yet shall the great God turn thy fate,
And bring thee back into thy monarch state
And majesty immaculate.
Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn,
Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn
Visions of golden treasuries of corn —
Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart
That manfully shall take thy part,
And tend thee,
And defend thee,
With antique sinew and with modern art.
This vision of the South's restored agriculture was one that remained with Lanier to the end. He did not properly appreciate the development of manufacturing in the South, but he believed that the redemption of the country would come through the development of agriculture — not the restoration of the large plantations of the old regime, but the large number of small farms with diversified products. On a later visit to the South he exclaimed to his brother, "My countrymen, why plant ye not the vineyards of the Lord?" and later he wrote in his essay on the "New South" of the actual fulfillment of his prophecy in "Corn".
Encouraged by the success of "Corn", Lanier, while giving a large part of his time to music during the winter of 1874-75, looked more and more in the direction of poetry. He writes again to Judge Bleckley, November 15, 1874: "Your encouraging words give me at once strength and pleasure. I hope hard and work hard to do something worthy of them some day. My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." He then proceeds to outline what is to be his first `magnum opus', "a long poem, founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century in France, called `The Jacquerie'. It was the first time that the big hungers of THE PEOPLE appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose, and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but which is a revelation from God of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise, as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of meanness — it is this which must in these latter days organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society. — This is about the plan which is to run through my book: though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."*
— * Quoted in part in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 65. —
Lanier never finished this poem, but he was soon hard at work on another which was based on the same idea, "The Symphony". Writing to his newly acquired friend, Mr. Peacock, March 24, 1875, he says: "About four days ago, a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since. I call it `The Symphony': I personify each instrument in the orchestra, and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished; and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit." The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", June, 1875; and besides confirming the good opinion of Mr. Peacock, won the praise of Bayard Taylor, George H. Calvert, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charlotte Cushman, and was copied in full in Dwight's "Journal of Music".
As in his first poem Lanier had pointed out a defect in Southern life, so in his second long poem he struck at one of the evils of national life. In the South he felt that there was not enough of the spirit of industry; looking at the nation as a whole, however, he exclaims: —
"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart — 't is tired of head:
We are all for love," the violins said.