Sidney Lanier Quotes
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.
Though a great early science, he was ignorant of the many non-genetic factors that could cause deformities in children ranging from nutritional deficiency to improper delivery techniques. Even in the genetic area he had no inkling of mutations where deformities develop and have NOTHING to do with either parent’s genetic history. Last, he did not realize that a large proportion of all pregnancies abort before the mother even realizes that she was pregnant.
Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned (resulting in his catching tuberculosis), taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes, though not exclusively, used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry. Many schools, other structures and two lakes are named for him, and he became hailed in the South as the "poet of the Confederacy". A 1972 US postage stamp honored him as an "American poet".
