The Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 8

the meantime.
"I do not understand this."
==
Lanier's was an unknown name, and he would write only in obedience
to his own sense of art, and he did not fit his wares
to the taste of
those who buy verse. It was to comfort his wife, in this period of
greatest uncertainty whether he had not erred in launching in the sea of

literature, that he wrote again
a letter of frankest confession:
==
"I will make to thee a little confession of faith, telling thee, my
dearer self, in words, what I do not say to my not-so-dear-self except in
more modest feeling.
"Know, then, that disappointments were inevitable, and will still come
until I have fought the battle which every great artist has had to fight
since time began. This -- dimly felt while I was doubtful
of my own
vocation and powers -- is clear as the sun to me now that I KNOW,
through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life
and utterance, a great poet.
"The philosophy of my disappointments is, that there is so much
CLEVERNESS standing betwixt me and the public . . . Richard
Wagner is sixty years old and over, and one-half of the most cultivated
artists of the most cultivated art-land, quoad music, still think him an
absurdity. Says Schumann in one of his letters: `The publishers will not
listen to me for a moment'; and dost thou not remember Schubert, and
Richter, and John Keats, and a sweet host more?
"Now this is written because I sit here in my room daily,
and picture
THEE picturing ME worn, and troubled, or disheartened; and because I
do not wish thee to think up any groundless sorrow in thy soul. Of
course I have my keen sorrows, momentarily more keen than I would
like any one to know; but I thank God that in a knowledge of Him and
of myself which cometh to me daily in fresh revelations, I have a
steadfast firmament of blue, in which all clouds soon dissolve.
I have
wanted to say this several times of late, but it is not easy to bring one's
self to talk so of one's self, even to one's dearer self.
"Have then . . . no fears nor anxieties in my behalf;
look upon all my
disappointments as mere witnesses that art has no enemy so unrelenting
as cleverness, and as rough weather that seasons timber. It is of little
consequence whether *I* fail; the *I* in the matter is a small business:
`Que mon nom soit fle/tri, que la France soit libre!' quoth Danton;
which is to say, interpreted by my environment: Let my name perish --

the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth
not, and the heart that needs it will find it." ==
Having now given sacredly to art what vital forces his will could
command, he devoted himself, with an intense energy, to the study
of
English literature, making himself a master of Anglo-Saxon and early
English texts, and pursuing the study down to our own times. He read
freely, also, and with a scholar's nice eagerness,
in further fields of
study, but all with a view to gathering the stores which a full man
might draw from in the practice of poetic art; for he had that large
compass which sees and seeks truths
in various excursions, and no
field of history, or philology, or philosophy, or science found him
unsympathetic. The opportunity for these studies opened a new era in
his development, while we begin to find a crystallization of that theory
of formal verse which he adopted, and a growing power to master it. To
this artistic side of poetry he gave, from this time, very special study,
until he had formulated it in his lectures in the Johns Hopkins
University, and in his volume "The Science of English Verse".
But from this time the struggle against his fatal disease
was conscious
and constant. In May, 1874, he visited Florida under an engagement to
write a book for distribution by a railroad company. Two months of the
summer were spent with his family at Sunnyside, Ga., where "Corn"
was written. This poem, published in `Lippincott's Magazine', was
much copied, and made him known to many admirers.
No one of
these was of so much value to him as Bayard Taylor, at whose
suggestion he was chosen to write the cantata
for the opening of the
Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, and with whom he carried on a
correspondence so long as Mr. Taylor lived. To Mr. Taylor he owed
introductions of value to other writers, and for his sympathy and aid his
letters prove that he felt very grateful. In his first letter to Mr. Taylor,
written August 7, 1875, he says:
==
"I