SOURCE: England, Kenneth. “Sidney Lanier in C Major.” In Reality and Myth: Essays in American Literature in Memory of Richmond Croom Beatty, edited by William E. Walker and Robert L. Welker, pp. 60-70. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1964.

In the following essay, England portrays Lanier as an unsuccessful poet and a minor literary figure whose limited accomplishments were influenced by sentimentality and a romantic nostalgia for the pre-Civil War “Old South” of his youth.

In both his poetry and his prose, Sidney Lanier exhibits a bifold attitude in his view of the affairs of life in the South after the War. He does after the War condemn the slavery system which he has fought to preserve, but he would have the slave in freedom overseen by a beneficent master who would look after the welfare of the mentally and morally limited colored people. He does condemn soul-killing trade, but...