1
If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.Sidney Lanier
2
Music is love in search of a word.Sidney Lanier
3
Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.Sidney Lanier
4 Quotes & Sayings By Sidney Lanier
Sidney Lanier was an American poet who wrote the national anthem of the Confederacy. Sidney Lanier was born in 1842 to a slave mother and a free father who had been a man of color in the British Army. His mother died when he was young, and his father moved to Richmond, Virginia, where he worked as a shopkeeper and eventually became head of the Department of Free Negroes. By age ten, Sidney was a slave himself. He could not read or write until he was twelve years old, and by that time his father had died, leaving him the sole support of his mother
He left school when he was fourteen to work on the railroad under Colonel Charles Lanier, who gave him room and board in exchange for his services as an instructor in mathematics. Lanier later wrote "My Diary in America" (1871), which is an account of life as an African-American in pre-Civil War Virginia at that time. At nineteen, he published "Ballads and Other Poems" with no success whatsoever.
His next book, "The Southern Poets," appeared in 1874; this collection included "The Cavalier," which became the official state song of Georgia when it was adopted during the Civil War (when it replaced "Dixie"). After achieving some success with this volume, he retired to his estate in rural Virginia to write poetry full-time. He had no formal education beyond high school; however, he was well read through extensive reading; he is credited with having read more than six hundred books since childhood.
The same year that "The Southern Poets" was published, John Greenleaf Whittier invited him to participate in a national literary contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Press Association; after winning this competition by publishing poetry three times daily for three months, he won $100 for each poem printed in newspapers across America. In 1875 at age twenty-three, after touring Europe for six months with two other writers -- Edward Dyson and William Elliott Perkins -- he returned to his estate on McClellan's Island near Dumfries, Virginia. In 1878 Lanier married Emily Hastings Boyd who had come from England with her family on their way to Texas some years before; she loved music and taught herself to play piano while Lanier worked at writing poetry. They lived on McClellan's Island for thirty years before moving into a house just outside Richmond some years before their deaths.
During this period their only child