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Sidney Lanier Quotes

Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned , taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes, though not exclusively, used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry. Many schools, other structures and two lakes are named for him, and he became hailed in the South as the "poet of the Confederacy". A 1972 US postage stamp honored him as an "American poet". Wikipedia  

✵ 3. February 1842 – 7. September 1881
Sidney Lanier photo
Sidney Lanier: 15 quotes2 likes

Famous Sidney Lanier Quotes

“And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word.”

Sidney Lanier

"The Symphony" (1875).
Poetry

“On Whitman - His poetry refreshed me like harsh salt spray.”

Sidney Lanier

From Memorial by William Hayes Ward to The Poems of Sidney Lanier (ed. Mary D Lanier)

“Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me.”

Sidney Lanier

Special Pleading 1875 (Lanier's poem on Time).

“Virginal shy lights,
Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
Of the heavenly woods and glades,
That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
The wide sea-marshes of Glynn.”

Sidney Lanier

"The Marshes of Glynn" (1878).
Poetry

“Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.”

Sidney Lanier

Tiger Lilies a novel, Hurd & Houghton , New York 1867

Sidney Lanier Quotes

“On William Morris - He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile.”

Sidney Lanier

“O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart — 'tis tired of head.”

Sidney Lanier

"The Symphony" (1875).
Poetry

“Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.”

Sidney Lanier

Preface to The Science of English Verse 1880

“Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.”

Sidney Lanier

"The Marshes of Glynn" (1878).
Poetry

“The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West.”

Sidney Lanier

"The Marshes of Glynn" (1878).
Poetry

“The incalculable Up-and-Down of Time.”

Sidney Lanier

"Clover", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Poetry

“Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style”

Sidney Lanier

From Memorial by William Hayes Ward to The Poems of Sidney Lanier (ed. Mary D Lanier)

“On Poe - I esteem Poe more highly than my countrymen are won't to do. The trouble with him (Poe) was, he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet.”

Sidney Lanier

“My priciple is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him, utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.”

Sidney Lanier

Letter to the poet's father May 6 1876.

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