Sidney Lanier

by Edwin Mims

In the "English Novel" he says: "For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet the great artist."

Lanier believed that he was, or would be, a great poet. While for a time he considered music as his special field of work and "poetry as a mere tangent," after 1875 his aspiration took the direction of poetry. Criticism of his work only strengthened his conviction that it was of a high order. Letters to his father and to his wife indicate his positive conviction that he was meeting with the misunderstanding that every great artist has met since the world began: "Let my name perish, — the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it." "I KNOW, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet," he said again.

Accordingly he hoped that he would accomplish something different from the popular poetry of the period. Time and again he spoke of "the feeble magazine lyrics" of his time. "This is the kind of poetry that is technically called culture poetry, yet it is in reality the product of a WANT of culture. If these gentlemen and ladies would read the old English poetry . . . they could never be content to put forth these little diffuse prettinesses and dandy kickshaws of verse." And again: "In looking around at the publications of the younger American poets, I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even ATTEMPT anything great. . . . Hence the endless multiplications of those little feeble magazine lyrics which we all know: consisting of one minute idea each, which is put in the last line of the fourth verse, the other three verses and three lines being mere surplusage." His characterizations of contemporary poetry are strikingly like those of Walt Whitman. Different as they were in nearly every respect, the two poets were yet alike in their idea that there should be a reaction against the conventional and artificial poetry of their time, — the difference being, that Whitman's reaction took the direction of formlessness, while Lanier's was concerned about the extension and revival of poetic forms. In both poets there is a range and sweep, both of conception and of utterance, that sharply differentiates them from all other poets since the Civil War.

The question then is, whether Lanier, with his lofty conception of the poet's work, and with his faith in himself, succeeded in writing poetry that will stand the test of time. He undoubtedly had some of the necessary qualities of a poet. He had, first of all, a sense of melody that found vent primarily in music and then in words which moved with a certain rhythmic cadence. "A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep; it was going when I awoke. This melody is always moving along in the background of my spirit. If I wish to compose, I abstract my attention from the things which occupy the front of the stage, the `dramatis personae' of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear." "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he writes at another time. His best poems move to the cadence of a tune. He probably heard them as did Milton the lines of "Paradise Lost". Sometimes there was a lilt like the singing of a bird, and sometimes the lyric cry, and yet again the music of the orchestra. "He has an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an answer, or an echo, or a compensating note," says Mr. Higginson. Sometimes, as in the "Marshes of Glynn" and in the best parts of "Sunrise", there is a cosmic rhythm that is like unto the rhythmic beating of the heart of God, of which Poe and Lanier have written eloquently.

Besides this melody that was temperamental, Lanier had ideas. He was alive to the problems of his age and to the beauties of nature. One has only to think of the names of his poems to realize how many themes occupied his attention. He wrote of religion, social questions, science, philosophy, nature, love. "My head and my heart are both [so] full of poems," he says. "So many great ideas for art are born to me each day, I am swept into the land of All-delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind." "Every leaf that I brush against breeds a poem." "A thousand vital elements rill through my soul." So he is in no sense a "jingle man". There is a note of healthy mysticism in his poetry that makes him akin to Wordsworth and Emerson. A series of poems might be selected that would entitle him to the praise of being "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit."

With the spiritual endowment of a poet and an unusual sense of melody, where was he lacking in what makes a great poet? In power of expression. He never attained, except in a few poems, that union of sound and sense which is characteristic of the best poetry. The touch of finality is not in his words; the subtle charm of verse outside of the melody and the meaning is not his — he failed to get the last "touches of vitalizing force." He did not, as Lowell said of Keats, "rediscover the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary." He did not attain to "the perfection and the precision of the instantaneous line." Take his poem "Remonstrance", for instance. It is a strong utterance against tyranny and intolerance and bigotry, hot from his soul; but the expression is not worthy of his feeling. A few lines of Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about freedom are better. The same may be said of his attack on agnosticism in "Acknowledgment". "Corn", while representing an extremely poetical situation, leaves one with the feeling of incompleteness: the ideas are not adequately or felicitously expressed. There is melody in the "Marsh Song at Sunset", but the poem is not clear. Or take what many consider his masterpiece, "Sunrise". There is one of the most imaginative situations a poet could have, — the ecstasy of the poet's soul as he rises from his bed to go to the forest, the silence of the night, the mystery of the deep green woods, the coming of "my lord, the Sun." There is nothing in American poetry that goes beyond the sweep and range of this conception. But look at the words; with the exception of the first stanza and those that describe the dawn, there is a nervousness of style, a strain of expression. If one compare even the best parts with the "Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty" by Wordsworth, he sees the difference in the art of expression. There is in Wordsworth's poem the romantic mood, — the same uplift of soul in the presence of the greater phenomena of nature, — but there is a classic restraint of form; it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

What, then, is the explanation of this defect in Lanier? Undoubtedly lack of time to revise his work is one cause. Speaking of one of his poems, he said, "Being cool next day, I find some flaws in my poem." And again, "On seeing the poem in print, I find it faulty; there's too much matter in it." Sickness, poverty, and hard work prevented him from having that repose which is the proper mood of the artist. He had to write as long a poem as "The Symphony" in four days, the "Psalm of the West" in a few weeks. "Sunrise" was dictated on his death-bed. The revision of "Corn" and of all other poems which I have been able to compare with the first drafts shows conclusively that he had the power of improving his work. With more time he might have achieved with all of his poems some of the results attained by such careful workmen as Tennyson and Poe.

But lack of time for revision will not explain all. There were certain temperamental defects in Lanier as poet. There was a lack of spontaneous utterance. Writing once of Swinburne, he used words that characterize well one phase of his own work: "It is always the Fourth of July with Mr. Swinburne. It is impossible in reading this strained laborious matter not to remember that the case of poetry is precisely that where he who conquers, conquers without strain. There was a certain damsel who once came to King Arthur's court, `gert' (as sweet Sir Thomas Malory hath it) `with a sword for to find a man of such virtue to draw it out of the scabbard.' King Arthur, to set example to his knights, first essayed, and pulled at it eagerly, but the sword would not out. `Sir,' said the damsel, `ye need not to pull half so hard, for he that shall pull it out shall do it with little might.'" This is not to say that Lanier simulated poetic expression, but his words are not inevitable enough. He often lacked simplicity.

Furthermore, he suffered from a tendency to indulge in fancies, "sucking sweet similes out of the most diverse objects." He was inoculated with the "conceit virus" of the seventeenth century. In a letter already quoted, he pointed out this defect to his father, and he never overcame it. He did not restrain his luxuriant imagination. The poem "Clover" is almost spoiled by the conceit of the ox representing the "Course-of-things" and trampling upon the souls (the clover-blossoms) of the poets. "Sunrise" is marred by the figure of the bee-hive from which the "star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee, . . . the great Sun-Bee," emerges in the morning. Such examples might be easily multiplied.

Lanier was undoubtedly hampered, too, by his theory of verse. The very poem "Special Pleading", in which he said that he began to work out his theory, is a failure. Alliteration, assonance, compound words, personifications, are greatly overused. Some of the rhymes are as grotesque as Browning's. Instead of the perfect union of sound and sense, there is often a mere chanting of words.