Sidney Clopton Lanier has been acknowledged as being one of the finest poets produced by the South in the nineteenth century. Though critics differ about his importance to twentieth-century poetry, it is generally accepted that he stands with Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the New England poets, and Herman Melville as a major contributor to the making of American poetry of the last century. Apart from this, he has a minor reputation for his controversial critical theory, which sought to unite poetry and music, and for his studies of Shakespeare, the "forerunners" of Shakespeare, and George Eliot. The considerable number of anthologies which include his poetry testify to his established place in the history of American romanticism. His criticism casts some interesting light on his development as a poet, and the poetry helps to explain his purpose in exploring his scholarly interests.

Few lives present outlines more mythic than...