Writing Style and Literary Theory
With his theory connecting musical notation with poetic meter, he developed a unique style of poetry written in logaoedic dactyls, which was strongly influenced by the works of his beloved Anglo-Saxon poets. He wrote several of his greatest poems in this meter, including "Revenge of Hamish" (1878), "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise". In Lanier's hands, the logaoedic dactylic meter led to a free-form, almost prose-like style of poetry that was greatly admired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, Charlotte Cushman, and other leading poets and critics of the day. A similar poetical meter was independently developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins at about the same time (there is no evidence that they knew each other or that either of them had read any of the other's works).
Lanier also published essays on other literary and musical topics and a notable series of four redactions of literary works about knightly combat and chivalry in modernized language more appealing to the boys of his day:
- The Boy's Froissart (1878), a retelling of Jean Froissart's Froissart's Chronicles, which tell of adventure, battle and custom in medieval England, France and Spain
- The Boy's King Arthur (1880), based on Sir Thomas Malory's compilation of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
- The Boy's Mabinogion (1881), based on the early Welsh legends of King Arthur, as retold in the Red Book of Hergest.
- The Boy's Percy (published posthumously in 1882), consisting of old ballads of war, adventure and love based on Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
He also wrote two travelogues that were widely read at the time, entitled Florida: Its Scenery, Climate and History (1875) and Sketches of India (1876) (although he never visited India).
Read more about this topic: Sidney Lanier
Famous quotes containing the words writing, style, literary and/or theory:
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“Many people have an oversimplified picture of bonding that could be called the “epoxy” theory of relationships...if you don’t get properly “glued” to your babies at exactly the right time, which only occurs very soon after birth, then you will have missed your chance.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)