Later, he and his brother Clifford served as pilots aboard English blockade runners,[9] and Lanier's ship, the Lucy, was captured by the USS Santiago de Cuba, on November 3, 1864.

[11] During this period he wrote a number of lesser poems, using the "cracker" and "negro" dialects of his day, about poor white and black farmers in the Reconstruction South.

While on one such journey in Texas, he rediscovered his native and untutored talent for the flute and decided to travel to the northeast in hopes of finding employment as a musician in an orchestra.

Unable to find work in New York City, Philadelphia, or Boston, he signed on to play flute for the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore, Maryland,[11] shortly after its organization.

[16] These poems are generally considered his greatest works, and have been set to music by many composers, including Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Grace W.

In Lanier's hands, the logaoedic dactylic meter led to a free-form, almost prose-like style of poetry that was greatly admired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, Charlotte Cushman, and other leading poets and critics of the day.

The "sprung verse" metric developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins at about the same time superficially resembles Lanier's practice but shows no influence (and there is no evidence that they knew each other or that either of them had read any of the other's works).

The Catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain and sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain."

Baltimore honored Lanier with a large and elaborate bronze and granite sculptural monument, created by Hans K. Schuler and located on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University.

Upon the construction of the iconic Duke Chapel between 1930 and 1935 on the university's West Campus, a statue of Lanier was included alongside two fellow prominent Southerners, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E.

[24] This statue, which appears to show a Lanier older than the 39 years he actually lived, is situated on the right side of the portico leading into the chapel narthex.

It is prominently featured on the cover of the 2010 autobiographical memoir Hannah's Child, by Stanley Hauerwas, a Methodist theologian teaching at Duke Divinity School.

[26] Lanier's poem "The Marshes of Glynn" is the inspiration for a cantata by the same name that was created by the modern English composer Andrew Downes to celebrate the Royal Opening of the Adrian Boult Hall in Birmingham, England, in 1986.