Sidney Lanier quotes

O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart - 'tis tired of head. (Sidney Lanier)

Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.

Sidney Lanier

Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.

Sidney Lanier

Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me.

Sidney Lanier

The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West.

Sidney Lanier

My priciple is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him, utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.

Sidney Lanier

And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word.

Sidney Lanier

Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style.

Sidney Lanier

On Poe - I esteem Poe more highly than my countrymen are won't to do. The trouble with him (Poe) was, he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet.

Sidney Lanier

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.

Sidney Lanier

If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants. (Sidney Lanier)

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

Sidney Lanier

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

Sidney Lanier

Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, Of the heavenly woods and glades, That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within The wide sea-marshes of Glynn.

Sidney Lanier

On William Morris - He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile.

Sidney Lanier

On Swinburne - He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt.

Sidney Lanier

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.

Sidney Lanier

On Whitman - His poetry refreshed me like harsh salt spray.

Sidney Lanier

The incalculable Up-and-Down of Time.

Sidney Lanier

Music is love searching for a word.

Sidney Lanier

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk. (Sidney Lanier)

But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?

Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier

Occupation: American Musician
Born: February 3, 1842
Died: September 7, 1881
Quotes count: 22
Wikipedia: Sidney Lanier

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