as Stedman says, "in extreme conjunction." He overflowed with fancy.
His imagination needed to be held in check. This was recognized in "Corn",
and appears more fully in "The Symphony", the first productions
which gave him wide recognition as a poet. Illustrations too much abound
to allow selection.

And for the substance of invention there needed, in Lanier's judgment,
large and exact knowledge of the world's facts. A poet must be
a student of things, truths, and men. His own studies were wide
and his scholarship accurate. He did not believe that art comes
all by instinct, without work. In one of his keen criticisms of poets
he said of Edgar A. Poe, whom he esteemed more highly
than his countrymen are wont to do: "The trouble with Poe was,
he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things
in order to be a great poet." Lanier had "a passion for the exact truth,"
and all of it.

The intense sacredness with which Lanier invested Art held him thrall
to the highest ethical ideas. To him the most beautiful thing of all
was Right. He loved the words, "the beauty of holiness",
and it pleased him to reverse the phrase and call it "the holiness of beauty".
When one reads Lanier, he is reminded of two writers, Milton and Ruskin.
More than any other great English authors they are dominated by
this beauty of holiness. Lanier was saturated with it.
It shines out of every line he wrote. It is not that he never wrote
a maudlin line, but that every thought was lofty. That it must be so
was a first postulate of his Art. Hear his words to the students
of Johns Hopkins University:

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