Sidney Lanier, Flute and Fever

Sidney Lanier was born in Macon on February third, eighteen forty-two, in a house on High Street that still stands. His neighbors knew him as a gifted student, fluent in music and literature from an early age, the kind of young man who graduated first in his class from Oglethorpe University just as the Civil War began. He volunteered without hesitation. The war would cost him everything except the poems.

Lanier served in the Confederate Signal Corps and later as a sailor on blockade-running ships. In eighteen sixty-four, his vessel, the Lucy, was seized by Union forces. He spent months at Point Lookout military prison in Maryland, where the conditions were brutal and the winter was cold. He left Point Lookout with tuberculosis. The disease never left him.

What the war gave him, paradoxically, was time. In the years of recovery and poverty that followed, Lanier wrote. He became principal flutist with the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore and simultaneously published the poems that would make him famous in the South and respected in the North. His major works, including The Marshes of Glynn, drawn from Georgia's coastal salt marshes, and The Symphony, fused musical structure with poetic form in ways that influenced a generation of American writers. He published The Science of English Verse in eighteen eighty, arguing that poetry and music operated under the same fundamental laws.

He died in eighteen eighty-one at thirty-nine, the tuberculosis finally winning. Macon placed a statue of him in front of the high school that bears his name. The cottage where he was born is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He is buried in Baltimore, far from the Ocmulgee marshes that taught him how to listen.