SOURCE: Parks, Edd Winfield. “Lanier as Poet.” In Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes, pp. 183-201. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1967.

In the following essay, Parks considers Sidney Lanier as a poet, examines some of Lanier's better-known poems, and argues that he was never considered a major American poet because his poor health, sketchy education, and didacticism impaired his work.

Sidney Lanier hoped to become a major poet, and desired that his work be judged on that basis. Overpraise of regional literature disgusted him; as early as 1869 he attacked the “insidious evil … of regarding our literature as Southern literature, our poetry as Southern poetry, our pictures as Southern [sic] pictures. I mean the habit of glossing over the intrinsic defects of artistic productions by appealing to the Southern sympathies of the artist's countrymen.”¹ He was confident that his own...