Sidney Lanier
Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland
Marker Inscription
Sidney Lanier 1842-1881 poet, musician and scholar, "The sweet singer of the South." First writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University. Teacher at Eutaw Place School. Author of The Boys' King Arthur.
Erected by Bolton Hill Historic District
The Story
In the years after the Civil War, Sidney Lanier earned a national reputation as a poet and flutist while helping shape the intellectual life of the new Johns Hopkins University, where he became its first writer-in-residence. Known as "the sweet singer of the South," he also taught in Baltimore and retold Arthurian legend for young readers in The Boys' King Arthur. He died young, at 39, but left a lasting mark on American letters.
Why it matters
Lanier represents the flowering of Southern literary culture in the Gilded Age and the early ambitions of America's first modern research university.
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Related people
- · Sidney Lanier
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