SOURCE: Starke, Aubrey Harrison. “Florida and India.” In Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study, pp. 223-34. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933.

In the following excerpt, Starke examines Lanier's Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History and “Sketches of India,” which most critics consider to be substandard works. Starke argues that these works are important because of the ways Lanier either infused the work with his poetic style, as in the case of the former, or absented himself from the text, as with the latter.

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The way in which fame, invoked so long before, had come to Lanier could hardly have been more gratifying, but the fame he had won was not the only fact on which Lanier, at the end of the year 1875, might congratulate himself, for his financial position was more secure than it had ever been previously. He was selling poetry now to...