Sidney Lanier (1842-81) was a poet, tutor, soldier, lec­turer, clerk, scholar, linguist, novelist, and musician, all before the age of 39, when he died while living in his adopted city of Baltimore. At the time of his death, he was considered one of the country's great poets, ranking just after Poe, Whitman, and Emerson.

While in Baltimore, Lanier wrote most of his best­ known poems –“The Marshes of Glenn," "The Sym­phony,” "Psalm of the West," "Ballad of Trees and the Master,” and "Ode to the Johns Hopkins University." These few short years, from 1873 to 1881, were the hap­piest of his life. He worked incessantly on the public lectures that he gave at Hopkins and Peabody and above all on his poetry, for which many felt he had forsaken his first love, music. But by 1881 he had entered the last stages of his consumption and had moved temporarily with his family to Ashville, North Carolina, for the heal­ing air of the mountains. It was there that he died, just after completing "Sunrise,” considered one of his great­est poems.

A line from this last poem –“I am lit by the sun”–­ appears on his grave marker in the Turnbull family plot, and it is referred to in the relief behind the seated fig­ure of Lanier in the monument commissioned by the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City to mark the centenary of his birth. Just to the left of the two female figures representing the muses of poetry and music can be seen the sun and the sun's rays on the horizon.

On February 3, 1942, on what would have been Lanier's one hundredth birthday, Johns Hopkins presi­dent Isaiah Bowman accepted the gift of Hans Schuler's unique monument from R. E. Lee Taylor, president of the Municipal Art Society. Gilman had described Lanier as "striking in appearance, his looks, manner and speech distinctive.” Those words and his person­ally rewarding life in Baltimore as an acclaimed flutist and poet are reflected in this unusual portrait. Lanier is depicted with the long beard seen in all representations of him, even though it makes him appear older than his years. He is shown seated on a cluster of natural boulders placed in front of a huge bas-relief. He is for­mally dressed, and his tall, elegant frame is much in evidence. Schuler chose to present Lanier deep in thought, working on a poem, evidenced by his gaze focused on the book in his lap and the pencil in his right hand. His flute is nearby, a clear reflection that poetry and music both contributed to the happiness he experienced in Baltimore, most notably his appointment to the faculty of Johns Hopkins. The tinge of sadness inherent in the monument serves to mark the shortness of his life and raises the question how much more he might have achieved.

Source: Kelly, Cindy, Outdoor Sculpture in Baltimore: A Historical Guide to Public Art in the Monumental City, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.