In the following essay excerpt, De Bellis analyzes "The Song of the Chattahoochee," asserting that "the music rather than the idea controls the poem."

Lanier's guidebook, Florida (1876), commissioned, ironically enough, by a railroad owner who had liked "Corn," served as a transition from his earlier attitudes toward nature. Naturally the Nation attacked it for its "rhetorical-poetical foible of seeing 'God in everything,'" as is shown in some similes. But Lanier had begun to express a new idea in this book; nature is an "everlasting Word" which reveals God is everything. In his wild river and in his mysterious marshes, Lanier adds to the beneficence, purposiveness, and harmony of nature a sublimity, while he continues the idea dramatized in Tiger-Lilies of nature as guide. His travel book had guided him toward a new handling of nature, one partly heralded by "Corn" and "The Symphony" but one incorporating...