How a DC neighborhood got the name of a Georgia poet
Sidney Lanier Bridge. Photo by NatalieMaynor on Flickr.
Lanier Heights, near Adams Morgan, isn’t home to any live oaks or tidal marshes. But the person after whom the neighborhood is named, Sidney Lanier, is famous for his poetry about the natural beauty of his native Georgia.
And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
Roll in on the souls of men,
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.
During the Civil War, Lanier served in the Confederate army, remaining loyal to his home state of Georgia. However, he was captured by Union forces and imprisoned at a prisoner of war camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. There, he contracted tuberculosis.
The experience of having the debilitating disease and of seeing the death and destruction wrought upon the South, and especially Georgia, heavily influenced his life and his later writings.
Lanier eventually made his way to Baltimore, where he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. To help support his family, he began publishing his poetry in magazines, and doing so he gained a bit of notoriety.
At the time of his death in 1881, at the age of 39, his popularity was very high. Around this time, Lanier Heights was being laid out, and many sources believe the name refers to the Georgian poet. There are others, though, that disagree.
While his poems are generally couched in the natural beauty of the South, the underlying themes often deal with mortality.
In Georgia, he is very well known. In fact, the state named Lanier County after him. The longest bridge in the state, which carries US 17 over the South Brunswick River near the salt marshes in Glynn County is also named for him. As is Lake Sidney Lanier, the primary drinking water reservoir for the Atlanta region, which flooded the “valleys of Hall [County]” referenced in his poem Song of the Chattahoochee.
Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover’s pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.
Lanier is buried in Baltimore’s Greenmount Cemetery.