" But an adequate "National Ode" was not in him. Sidney
Lanier, who was writing in that year his "Psalm of the West" and
was soon to compose "The Marshes of Glynn," had far more of the
divine fire. He was a bookish Georgia youth who had served with
the Confederate army, and afterward, with broken health and in
dire poverty, gave his brief life to music and poetry. He had
rich capacities for both arts, but suffered in both from the lack
of discipline and from an impetuous, restless imagination which
drove him on to over-ambitious designs. Whatever the flaws in his
affluent verse, it has grown constantly in popular favor, and he
is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. The late Edmund
Clarence Stedman, whose "American Anthology" and critical
articles upon American poets did so much to enhance the
reputation of other men, was himself a maker of ringing lyrics
and spirited narrative verse. His later days were given
increasingly to criticism, and his "Life and Letters" is a
storehouse of material bearing upon the growth of New York as a
literary market-place during half a century.
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