Sidney Lanier
Sidney Clopton Lanier (February 3, 1842 – September 7, 1881) 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 (resulting in his catching
tuberculosis), taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church
organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes 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
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".
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