Sidney Lanier

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, taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes 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 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".

3 February 1842

Born on the same birth day (3 February): Antonio José de Sucre • Fred Lynn • Gaston Julia • Howard Phillips (activist) • Ilana Sod • James Clark McReynolds • Joey Bishop • John Jefferson • Joseph Forlenze • Juan Negrín • Morgan Fairchild • Ram Singh Kuka • Ranald MacDonald • Risto Ryti • Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury • Shawn Phillips • Simone Weil

Born in the same month (February 1842): Agnes Mary Clerke • Alexandre Ribot • Arrigo Boito • Camille Flammarion • Eduard von Hartmann • Julian Sochocki • Karl May