Educational Media Reviews Online

Sidney Lanier, a Georgia-born, Confederate soldier who never recovered from illness sustained during his time as a prisoner of war, enjoyed some measure of fame in his adopted city of Baltimore as a poet, scholar, and flutist only near the end of his brief life. Unfortunately, this production succeeds in making the recounting of that life an exercise in dullness. The program is a video release of a 1983 effort by the state of Georgia and the production values are extremely uneven. Lanier, described in Gale's Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism as "a significant if minor figure in American literature," would have been far better served if the producers had skipped their attempts to dramatize his early life (especially the scene of the dance in which Confederate soldiers sporting blow-dried, shag haircuts vied for the belles who batted their eyelashes from beneath Farrah Fawcett-like coiffures), cut out all of the on-screen expert talkers, and concentrated on showcasing his poetry against a backdrop of scenes of the land that inspired him and the music that he loved. Not recommended.