The name Sidney Lanier is known to far fewer European than American readers. Whether he was born a poet, none but the galactic engineer of the Deus ex machina, scribe and universal tribe of humanity executing a plan gods and goddesses behind Sidney Lanier's mind, only know.
His career-chronology was the incantory rote-memorisation of a Southern Lawyer's bright son and light-boy annalists can make the gentleman with, in an enobling geaneological haunt through the printed record, the eye will fix and chaunt to re-daction.
Sidney Lanier was - at various times - a student, teacher, soldier, professional concert flautist, practicing lawyer, writer, English literature professor, poet and life long learner, who mastered and ascended through an impressive breadth and variance of artistic and secular disciplines.
He was born in Southern Alabama on February 3 1842 and died at 39 - September 7 1881 - after a two decade fight with tuberculosis, which claimed his body, but which his spirit transcended, as it subsumed in the physiological flame prematurley quenching to ember; it's intellectual mass and grasp soaring in inverse ratio to the body's decline.
As Lanier's end drew near - in, what in the longer span is, the first flush of middle years - so his mind blazed more intensely with knowing, the fierce power of it's source recorded in a dazzling array of sound-properties his ear divined from the oracle of nature's aural utterance, he translitterated to oral form via the method of compositional thought in which music is accorded equal weight to that of syntax, sound and sense swirling, hinged in equal balance on an iron age line of clunky magnetic sound, rivetted to a magnetic rip-tide of undertow, the linguistic force a metrical cortex, where the currency in language polarise to flux.
Lanier's life was conterminous with Gerard Manley Hopkins', born July 28 1844 and dying on June 8 1889 in Dublin, where his somewhat despondent body and soul had struggled for for the previous and final five years of one whose muse in first brief bright flush of effervesent and affirmational spark, gave way to bouts of guilt about God.
He swung ever less frequent, casual snaps of spontaeneous joy, followed by long withdrawel to the pits of self loathing and uun-release at his inner penitentiary of hopeless cloud and gloom discharging densely in ever more muffling claustraphobic dissolve, until typhoid claimed this 5' 2 " religious poet, two years after a slump into continual ill health signalled the copper fastening of his reality seeling his reputation: a manically minded quare and clinically depressed priest, unable to reconcile his "gay" centre with God.
Hopkins was an Anglican convert to the Catholic religion and jesuit teacher at colleges in the North of England including Stoneyhurst near the Lancashire village of Hurst Green, whose alumni include 12 ex-pupils who were the recipients of posthumous beatification, three with post life careers in sainthood.
Even cursory analyses along the clear metrical track on which these two men trod, reveal a polar-opposite physiological path was taken, but they shod their poet-shoe to a very similar middle English feet, clomping and clanking along in Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, the poem's language-vein earthed clearly on the critical map.
Both poets attempted to prose-out this foxingly complex cognisance of how detailed the compositional system they discovered in the alliterative field of middle-english literature actually is. In the simple binary of poetic enlightenment, Hopkins is cast as poetic failure of two humans unconnected and living on different continents, with a similar poetic spoor that compare.
The evidence Hopkins' left, ultimately sway a judge to deliver the verdict of "failed-masterplan," the proclomation, being "out,"out of the question. He became a jesuit instead of openly gay, causing him self-imposed exile, delusion and an ineffable God without the goddess, subserviant, Goddess lusting after Eros, Lugh, Finn McCool and how it affects the Manly language of chance and failure, the prayer garbled answer unreliable, absent from the peak of joy, present inthe pit of despair.
His earlier system of air was successfully launched, his earlier work bouyant, affirmational, God is good, present, correct and crisplyHomeric and un-eroded by the ocean of self-loathing, the profoudly spiritual squall and storm of thought yet to plague and empty into his cauldron of experience, whirring easy, free and in love, until a tragic death by drowning, his muse, Digbeth Mackworth Dolben, who Hopkins had fallen in love with when at Oxford and upon first seeing Dolben, an outwardly flambouyant and openly homoerotic wit, also poet, who Hopkins was madly in love with.
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Sidney Lanier entered Oglesthorpe University near Midgesville, Atlanta in 1856 as a precociously talented sophomore student and son of a local lawyer, then graduated first in his class four years later and took up immediate employment in his alma mater, where he taught for two years, until joining the the Confedarate army in April 1861.
A young man interested only in books and music who had two short years of adulthood learning the art of educational empowerment, beneath a collegiate coat of arms whose motto -
Nescit Cedera -
He does not know what it is to give up - was coupled to a charge of three boars' heads.
This heraldic devise, whose learning-purpose of tacking an oath of feality to life-long learning and mastery of the broad brush of universal gift in all things that turn a gentlemanly Georgian's mind first to civil-war, and from then on his intellectual grasp was exercised all his short life.
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But whereas a thorough inspection of Irish literature would have aided Hopkins in his quest for a perfect and complex working meter, his time in Dublin soured, and using Welsh poetry to find his balancing facts, Hopkins wrought the evidence of straightforward utterance, sounded tinged with an accurate amount of bardic interest and laudable regard.
The meter in Lanier's
The Symphony is aptly sprung and springs before us the first word-clue in the world, or "poetic" of a poem.
We experience and recognise word-suggestion for what is, the forward motion associated with a fixed point of visual reference, from which something coiled, springs or flits to. Commas are suggestive of this, see?
The primary stress is one of upswinging motion, the verb approaches. A cat on the ballard about to leap, dart hitting bullseye and panther on bough or leopard in a cage eyeing the line of sight to the moon above a Zoo Keeper's head.
It is strikingly clear Hopkins and Lanier are unequivically, equally and undeniably, unique poets, whose critical personae behind what the intellectual eye had sighted, were obsessed by prosody and sought a "pure" poetic, one suspects, whose grain agitating as an oyster-germ, was an alternative to Humanity's muse few are chosen to practice.
The unfair oddity about sprung rhthm is that the god accredited for its coinage erupted only from one source, Gerald "Manley" Hopkin's, God in the cannon of coiled verse.
When consciously drawn to examine the route of this charge by tracing back through the printed transaction it's currency is responsible for bringing to pass, it becomes clear that the tortured Gerald was not alone in his quest. That a man 6000 miles away was ploughing a furrow of startlingly similarity.
But whereas the sniggering oxymoronic mind can deal cruel hands of pre-ordained longings that caused Hopkins to self-bind over the course of his life, ever tighter and more tortured as time wound him ineluctably in towards the biblical critical mass of belief in tragic showers of self-bullying fate dappled tawny non-cruisers on a highway.
After a perfectly North London time of being a happy flower, Hopkins trotted to Balliol College Oxford. BCO, spies, writers, and artists the globe over known by a hand-cant of waggle, in thumb to middle digital-tip, jerking wrist toss and jiggle.
Hopkins starred his way through Balliol, all in the ranks affirmed his crown of premier colligiate poet with a first class mind in the classics. Top laurel, lock of baize holding hardy Greece, Rome, Myth, kiss me You, He who were so whoever names it, is the capital chap capped at the cricket pitch, one top clod for god-fancying Hopkins falling in love in Oxford, on location where he met the two men who de-mist his history and allow us access to what ghost of memory's dark-cloud scud a bi-polar sketch of tragedy clot in a deep, physiological urge and effulgent need to route, understand and sit on the core seat where poetic roots coil and sketch his tragic understanding and the trajectory of Robert Bridges.
Robert Bridges was the pivotal publishing influence in Hopkin's life. It was Bridges who also introduced him to not an Aphrodite muse, but Hopkin's Eros. Digby Mackworth Dolben, the god Hopkin's co-drew when he became posthumous, sorrow's datum distinct and original as Lanier Baudelaire, Verlaine or Rimbaud, the Decadent or
Poète Maudit - the Accursed French Poet, all executing their doings as Hopkins and Lanier lived time in the immediate half century post first brutal flowering of a new global Republic and Pain proclomation, demand and utterance for human equality.
Lendier was a man with a different capacity, whose thirst was not the drunken addiction that accounts for a dissolusioned state, but a consumptive seeking cure for the tuberculosis he caught during the five months spent in a military prison in Maryland at the end of the civil war.
Lindier seeks to praise love as being the pure force of Godness, eloquently and evenly expressed. The flip side to this incredible flight of scape which configure on the page via his glide and verbal thermaling, is the gloomier sound in the material, I opted to operate on and remove in the make-through.
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Lanier's poetic acheivement is above the ordinary field of sociological play and cultural flux, his art a mirror on the time more clearly real, his solitary and unique inner struggle of 39 years before succombing to tuburculosis, which he'd contracted after 5 months in the Maryland military hospital and which he removed himself from on foot in a very poor state of health, striding out on a seven week trek home, going back to Georgia after five years fighting, first as private in the same regiment as his brother, who did not seperate during the war, serving in the same regiment, Lanier always reading and working towards a mastery of the musical instrument for which he is forever linked and balancing this half of his poetical practice with a written form of release.
Landier's inelectable dixieland destiny at the outbreak of the American Civil War was as a Confederate soldier, whose ghost now moves and haunts in innocence of years abruptly ended when the long-hual of so much unrecorded and forgotten shifts of minor to major key- tremors, semi-quaver and a unit of air-weight most do not apprehend, fly about in sound of gods prosodic scale and drop to het jazzy hep-cat doing bendy yoga moves that drew a meeting on the page not to order, but the hood and lynch post Reconstruction, redemptionist klan of cracker-tongued Redeemer-scum and trailor-trash begging biblical forgiveness for masked punishment whuppings with a bible's thick belt and hellfire, going on back home to Georgias, always burning on my preacher's mind-prick divinely sought.
His brimstone was ordered for ending life in the flock of eternal sinning little boy, silence, removed to forgivness, charity, hope, all freedom and right of natural knights in poison and splendor whipped a light-godness to cork top, de-colonise the culture code, cream of music in a tragedy of absence, invention and remeberence of their past ancestor-pile, honest reflection, opining our ghostly recollection, the porcine daemon reconciled to Sidney guiding Lanier at a time when the barbarous fact of slave was a life-reality facing the artist compassing a force to America's cultural-compress, as he struggled on the long road home.
The financial explosion the vacuum of peace sucked awash in a reforming zeal of the post-Lincoln Republican Party’s political-economic coalition of carpet-baggers, freedmen and scallawags - southern whites.
In the 8 years of the Reconstruction period of 1865-1873, collasal sums were invested into the newly liberated South and this time saw the highest level of Afro-America's political intergaration American history can boast. Tragically and against all norms of human decency this sweet short promise of freedom's breath was cruelly expired at it's first pre-awakening bud as - on the 3 March 1866 - Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was smuggled into the White House to take Presidential Oath in secret, cloaked dagger of democracy and tulmut of civil war had led to a hit on the first truly Republican frontier king Abraham, grandfather killed by Indian arrow, born in the dirt at Sinking Spring, a large boy and man with an easy manner and hatred of slavery, reared himself to read the Waterstone law bible and become a successfull attorney.
Abe's ghost paraphrase, tell, twist, split the word in two:
"Either the opponents of racisim arrest it's further spread and the public mind will rest in a belief it's course is one of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it is lawful in all States, old, new and all points of the compass, government cannot endure, permanently half racist and half not. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided."
Bother, splother, it's one thing or all the other after it become's, Hayes ensconced in the red room of paraphrase.
Rutherford Hayes was "Rutherfraud," to his opponents, there to serve up the Redemption, the return of Slaveocracy in government, the sudden brief spurt of emancipation, carved up to stop and reverse, freedom lost and locked away, the pulse in the gush of liberation suddenly turned off in unfair and oppressive legislation of delusional imperialist's in moral decline after the bitter and devisive election where both sides did as much as they could possibly deny and acted as corruptly as they could, Republican Rutherfraud winning with 250,000 less votes than his rivals.
The obvious reason a done-deal and stich up between Republican and Democrat, agreement that Haye's pulls all federal troops North and abandons democracy plans to the dominant klan bossess, racist businesses doctrine, with freshly pious and repentantly Southern partner whites their weld, wield and flex of political force of an inchoate Democrat party and oxymoron, firmly repelling any practically aided ideas of continuing the oxymoronic emancipation of a defeated and silently united race, regarded as legitimate human property, their intellectual owners, wrappers up with language, whose capacity for religious duplicity to subliminate - after a decade wound-licking - via capatilistic connivancy and ruthless accusations at it's Republican opposition, that endemic corruption and violation of true Paine ethics were being inherently enacted by a force of - somewhat innacurately methinks - biblical wickedness, and - what came to pass as - the Redemption was needed
Espousing with Bible force at the heart of politics, pre-cursor Democrats, Redeemers spouting scripture and with nothing but hatred to keep their spirit from sinning, who clung mind bogglingly on and morphed into the Democratic party proper, declaiming a rhetoric of appartheid, exclusion and the process whereby a scallawa minority will of whites opting out of Reconstruction en masse and tipping the finely balancing national power, to re-annoint the pursuant force as a southern Slaveocracy fettering true Afro-America from flowering.
Thus the gentlemen spake in the olden, golden boom of bowery, dock, canning-plant, days when both Lanier and Hopkins, independantly and unaware of one another, through the fabric of narrative in their career histories, where a difference between
"Hello Father"
"Hello sailor"
And Lanier soldier Hopkins a priest born in
Stratford, Essex, the eldest of eight children and son of Catherine and Manley Hopkins, an insurance agent and consul-general for Hawaii based in London,
learning still with Anglican belief in his first alma mater, Highgate School, public and lofty above the lesser rank and order, leafy walk, cricket in the woods and Highgate School, where his first light of learning also shone bright amid a time when the average was of waxing stock.
A turbulant, short and somewhat murderous address for the dominant reality in a near past of the early bud -- ever increasing -- of all-technological modernity and continually new-age of the unpolluted pastoral voice of early Romanticism, waning as Anglo-lingo's premier poetic figurehead, England's Horace-equivalent of Wordsworth, who embossed an artistic definition, age and movement, got chopped, became a former premier, slowly stagnated, as his earlier force dipped from the peak of being "there," alive and gushing subliminal in the moment of Oneness ina Wood and lots of capitalisation for explaining important bits of the whole Construction to get into the copse of crispy picture and frond tickly Mayfern, made up in a kingdom of la la, the mind, William no longer danced on air through, but declining in slump beyond his return to dotage.
The Kavanagh-esque "kink" that makes Hopkins a real poetic macoy is his homoerotic battle raging on-page at his early Oxford journals that document the sublimated lust to feel and trajectory with his Muse and fellow poet, Digby Mackworth Dolben, whose death by drowning devasted the then 23 year old Hopkins, whose object of clear physiological thirst, reality removed and Hopkins spent the remaining half of his life in strict and severe seclusion, wrestling his tortured poetic spirit to upright the cauldron of self morality, the maze of ritual and less spectacular academic trek through creation, theological discipline, his conscience constantly, wrestled, match in cerebral machinations charachterised by severe and immense intensity that swung from inner summit to trough and valley from peak-mood where Manly's intellect crafted a male God who unlocks a key to what Hopkins defines "inscape" - essential preposition of the tantalising, unique and yet ultimately incoherent critical system offered us, that gyre as lofty and out of common touch as one’s in Yeats or Graves' white goddess, essentially knowable to oneself only, if at all, seeing as it's ,
The later less arresting and visceral height below which Wordsworth's early and middle poetical-power had sung, declining to the song of mechanical reality becoming an ever more and all-encompassing sublimation, importing history and human consciousness displaced, an entire pitch of play dividing opinion on how natural langauge is and over-laying belief inherent in the marrow of love's syntax, is an all-life-form metaphor and prayer humanity chooses, true sky-gods and stone-goddessess who demand you suffer what pin his or her hope on man or maid will prick and draw joy, sorrow, blood, tears lust, love and spend eternity combing in shake-down, sharpening their wit and tearing teeth at history's fact snapping a clamp on logical knowledge.
A poet with wider reach than most other contemporaries, Lendier stood apart from his tortured French counter-parts, whose crest upon the movement's anti-heroic shield was Baudelaire's
Fleur de Mal whose bole of legend carved in a dark pitted-thrall of the enfant terrible expressing extreme boredom and dispising the self and pointlessness in those around them, are minds lain waste by a cocktail of poor social conditions shaken to an art of poverty whose muse of alcohol and narcotic reflection flits in a pool where the mental terror-addicts fix the co-ordiante identies of their personae to physical person, whose radically different personalities still blent, connected by threads of chance, creative will, cognising apart, plied in silent syncretic fusion via a human force of script, forgiver and forgiven, the meek humble speech sprung pre-cursor to a rhythm of the macaronic method scattering a tongue's rememberance back along it's original lingo-loot route, to plash through a celestial word-stem, sift the universal unfettered beauty on a quest to float in utterance, incantory bubble, blather and effable booty breathed atop of what thermal mystic peak of sound did fleet speech reach and noise from.
These coalesced into "The Radicals," of allsorts eager to assist in - what began - the century-slow process of tortuous, begrudged and ill mannered emancipation, after it's tragic first and ultimately faltering start that federal government abandoned to the complicit and guilty inverse underbelly on which the America Dream evolved it's blinkered chimerical myth of liberty and freedom of utterance un-extorted but freely procalaiming in a civil exchange of lanague tempered by tolerance and as much good will, empathy and shared understanding as we are capable of acquiring.
Some who travelled this short carpet-ride through the cruelly brief Reconstruction period in recent American history, had fully enfranchising motives, but sadly too few to outweight the many more, less noble and entirely commercial considerations and reasons, apparent in the disspasionate modern glance cast back at this short false-start, when federal government and oligarchs seeded the first global conglomerates in an era immediatley pre-high capitalist mechanization, when all strands of identifible source fluxed and combined and wove the 8 year Reconstruction programme noted for it's unprecedented level of federal support, in the immediate aftermath and post-8 civil war years.
A southern minority-belt forced their wicked bible of scripturally wrong will on the union whose northern people turned a blindly complict eye to and the implementation of real freedom was dispensed with, cruelly cut down as mid-19C New World history began winding a stagnant course all supressed black citizens were forced to endure on their next hundred year walk of tortuous and non-divine tragedy.
The fair, swift first flowering and advance in emancipation was immediately pruned back and reversed as Reconstruction ended.
The Democrats sealed the effective reversing of in a series of racist legislation whose sole purpose was to remove and silence the voice of African-America, the ghost of tradgedy haunting a commercial wickedness inherently uncle Sam, yet culturally shared by all humanity.
