More than this,
Lanier at times manifests the simplicity that is granted
only to genius of the highest order: thus an English critic,*2*
who by the way declares that Lanier's volume has more of genius than
all the poems of Poe, or Longfellow, or Lowell (the humorous poems excepted),
and who considers Lanier the most original of all American poets,
and more original than any England has produced for the last thirty years,
says that "nothing can be more perfect than --
`The whole sweet round
Of littles that large life compound,'"*3*
lines in `My Springs', and that "the touch of wonder in the last two lines,
`I marvel that God made you mine,
For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine,'*4*
is as simple and exquisite as any touch of tenderness in our literature."
I frankly admit that several of Lanier's best poems,
as `Corn', `The Marshes of Glynn', and `Sunrise', are not simple;
but the same thing is true of Milton's `Paradise Lost' and of Browning's
`The Ring and the Book', and yet this fact does not exclude these two works
from the list of great poems.
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