It is not probable that Sidney Lanier ever got much money out of his books.
“Tiger Lilies,” his novel, made no hit; “The Science of English Verse” could not possibly appeal to many; and even his volumes of verse had no considerable recognition during the poet’s life-time. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Lanier will ever be one of the favorites of all classes, like Burns and Byron, Longfellow and Bret Harte.
It appears to be the literal fact that the Georgia poet was always hard up. Poverty and Consumption were always dogging his steps. To keep himself and family from want, he had to be first-flute in the Concert, had to deliver those lectures. No matter how weak he was, no matter how ill and depressed, he had to go,—and he did go and go and go, until he was so far spent that it may be said that his last lectures were the death-rattle of a dying man. It is said that his hearers, to whom his condition was but too evident, listened to these final discourses “in a kind of fascinated terror.”
Read this extract from one of his letters to his wife:
“So many great ideas for Art are born to me each day, I am swept away into the land of All-Delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind; and I find within myself such entire, yet humble, confidence of possessing every single element of power to carry them all out, save the little paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us clothed and fed in the meantime.
“I do not understand this.”
(The black type is ours.)
It reminds one of that letter of Edgar Poe, written to Childers of Georgia, requesting a small loan and saying simply, abjectly, “I am so miserably poor and friendless.”
His poverty cowed Poe, and caused him to do unmanly things. Poverty did not cow Sidney Lanier, and never in his life did he do an unmanly thing. Much of the time he was not able to have his family with him. Therefore, the battle that was fought by this unfearing soul was a sick man, a lonely man, a care-worn man, a sensitive man, a very poor man against odds that he knew he could not long resist.
In 1905, Charles Scribner’s Sons brought out a complete collection of the “Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited by his wife.” Of those poems we have not space to write.