author
Sidney Lanier
1842–1881
Remembered for poems that move with the lift and flow of music, this 19th-century American writer brought the landscapes and sounds of the South vividly onto the page. His work is especially loved for its lyric energy, musical ear, and deep feeling for nature.
6 Audiobooks
The Poems of Sidney Lanier
by Sidney Lanier
Select Poems of Sidney Lanier
by Sidney Lanier
Knightly Legends of Wales; or, The Boy's Mabinogion Being the Earliest Welsh Tales of King Arthur in the Famous Red Book of Hergest
by Sidney Lanier
Poem Outlines
by Sidney Lanier
The English Novel and the Principle of its Development
by Sidney Lanier
Bob: The Story of Our Mocking-bird
by Sidney Lanier
About the author
Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842, Sidney Lanier grew up with a strong love of both literature and music. He studied at Oglethorpe College, served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, and later built a life as a poet, essayist, and skilled flutist.
Music shaped the way he wrote. Readers often point to the flowing rhythms of poems such as The Song of the Chattahoochee, The Marshes of Glynn, and Sunrise, where sound and sense seem to move together. He also wrote criticism and fiction, always with a strong interest in the connection between artistic form and feeling.
Lanier spent much of his adult life in fragile health and died in 1881 at just thirty-nine. Even so, his reputation endured, and he remains an important voice in American poetry for the way he joined musical language, natural description, and emotional intensity.