Poet

Verse.

Though his career was shortened by his death at the age of thirty-nine, Sidney Lanier wrote poetry that attempted to adapt and respond to a world disrupted by the violence of the Civil War, the unsettling advances of science, and the social upheaval of industrialization. He recognized the unsuitability of traditional forms—particularly those of the English Romantics—for dealing with modern realities, and he experimented with new rationales for the construction of verse based on sound. Along with his precursors Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and his contemporary Emily Dickinson, Lanier helped pave the way for the revolution in poetic forms and content that took place in the early twentieth century.

Civil War.

Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia, on 3 February 1842. The son of a successful lawyer, he was raised in an atmosphere that mixed strict Presbyterian morality with the Southern...