I will heartily lay me a-hold of the greatness of God.
This is written in the positive mood—and in the measure, too—of Browning’s “Saul.” Both poems record the throwing off of paralyzing restraint and the substitution of hope for dread that resulted from the religious struggles of the nineteenth century.
Lanier went far toward representing the South by the best of all methods, which is to write as a citizen of the world and not as a sectionalist. He was not at the height of his maturity, and he wrote at times with the exuberance and at times with the self-consciousness that he would in all likelihood have outgrown in the fullness of years. He was an aggressive thinker. Only the indifference of his generation to poetry can account for the fact that he was not persecuted for the courage of many utterances. And he was essentially the poet in artistry as well as in vision.
BOOK LIST
General References
Collections
Clarke, Jennie T. Songs of the South (Introduction by J. C. Harris). 1913.
Fulton, N. G. Southern Life in Southern Literature. 1917.
Kent, C. W. (literary editor). Library of Southern Literature. 1907. 15 vols.
Manly, Louise. Southern Literature. 1895.