"The Night of our knowledge" : Sidney Lanier and the struggle for faith

The purpose of this study is to examine the increasingly troubled religious beliefs of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier, and to place the progress of those beliefs within the larger context of nineteenth-century thought and literature.

Like other sensitive Victorians, Lanier was deeply disturbed by the ongoing controversy between science and religion, particularly the bitter debate over the theory of evolution which culminated in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. At the same time, Lanier's experiences as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War caused him to question the validity of organized religion in light of the churches' support of the war, and led him on a quest for personal salvation through the quasi-religions of Art and Love.

Following the lead of such disparate thinkers as Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lanier attempted to forge, through the bravely determined exertion of his own will, an individualized system of beliefs capable of reconciling the conflicts between science and religion, war and peace, and public and private responsibilities. The increasing inefficacy of his attempts forced Lanier, at the end of his life, into a spiritual crisis whose climax he poignantly documents in his greatest--and in some ways most misunderstood--poem, "The Marshes of Glynn."

Lanier's constant search for spiritual peace is traced through selections of his poetry, his novel, Tiger-Lilies, his public addresses and private letters. Particular attention has been paid to Lanier's posthumously published poem outlines, many of which indicate more clearly than his completed works the increasing doubt and anxiety he felt over the perceived decline of social, moral, and spiritual values in the years following the Civil War.

More than has been commonly assumed, Lanier was an artist whose life and work placed him at the forefront of his era's most pressing philosophical debate: the growing chasm between scientific discoveries and received religious doctrines. That his efforts to narrow, or at least to account for, this gap were less than completely successful either for him or for us, does not detract from the very real courage of his attempts. Lanier's troubled legacy of spiritual doubt, coupled with his lifelong struggle to believe, locates him squarely within the tide of mod-dern American literature, preoccupied as it is by its own unreconciled and perhaps irreconcilable conflict between faith and disbelief.