Sidney Lanier (February 3, 1842 - September 7, 1881) was an American musician and poet.

Lanier was born on February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia. He began playing the flute at an early age, and his love of that musical instrument continued throughout his life. He attended Oglethorpe University near Milledgeville, Georgia, graduating first in his class shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

He fought in the Civil War, primarily in the tidewater region of Virginia, where he served in the Confederate signal corps. Later, he and his brother Clifford served as pilots aboard English blockade runners. On one of these voyages, his ship was boarded. Refusing to take the advice of the British officers on board to don one of their uniforms and pretend to be one of them, he was captured. He was incarcerated in a military prison in Maryland, where he contracted tuberculosis (generally known as "consumption at the time"). He suffered greatly from this affliction for the rest of his life.

Shortly after the war, he finished writing his only novel, "Tiger Lilies" (1867), and married Mary Day. They took up residence in his hometown of Macon, and he began working in his father's law office. After taking and passing the Georgia bar, he practiced as a lawyer for several years. During this period he wrote a number of poems in the "cracker" and "negro" dialects of his day about poor white and black farmers in the Reconstruction South. He traveled extensively through southern and eastern portions of the United States in search of a cure for his tuberculosis.

While on one such journey in Texas, he rediscovered his native and untutored talent for the flute and decided to travel to the northeast in hopes of finding employment as a musician in an orchestra. Unable to find work in New York, Philadelphia or Boston, he signed on to play flute for the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore, Maryland shortly after its organization. He taught himself musical notation and quickly rose to the position of first flutist. He was famous in his day for his performances of a personal composition for the flute called "Black Birds," which mimics the song of that species.

In an effort to support Mary and their three sons, he also wrote poetry for magazines. His most famous poems were "Corn" (1875), "The Symphony" (1875), "Centennial Meditation" (1876), The Song of the Chattahoochee (1877), "The Marshes of Glynn" (1878) and "Sunrise" (1881). The latter two poems are generally considered his greatest works. They are part of an unfinished set of lyrical nature poems known as the "Hymns of the Marshes," which describe the vast, open salt marshes of Glynn County on the coast of Georgia.

Late in his life, he became a student, lecturer and, finally, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, specializing in the works of the English novelists, Shakespeare, the Elizabethan sonneteers, Chaucer and the Anglo-Saxon poets. He published a series of lectures entitled "The English Novel" (published posthumously in 1883) and a book entitled "The Science of English Verse" (1880), in which he developed a novel theory exploring the connections between musical notation and meter in poetry. Putting these theories into practice, 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 poem in this meter, including "The 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 literati of the day. A similar poetical meter was independently developed by Gerald 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. These consisted of (i) "The Boy's Froissart" (1878), a retelling of John Froissart's chronicles of advanture, battle and custom in medieval England, France and Spain; (ii) "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; (iii) "The Boy's Mabinogion" (1881), based on the early Welsh legends of King Aurthur, as retold in the "Red Book of Hergest"; and (iv) "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).

Lanier finally succumbed to complications caused by his tuberculosis on September 7, 1881, while convalescing with his family near Tryon, North Carolina. He was only 39.

Laniers poem The Marshes of Glynn is the inspiration for a cantata by the same name that was created by the modern English composer Andrew Downes to celebrate the Royal Opening of the Adrian Boult Hall in Birmingham, England in 1986.

Lake Lanier, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers northeast of Atlanta, is named in his honor.

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