Please give me your judgment on my effort, WITHOUT RESERVE;
for if you should say you do not like it, the only effect on me will be
to make me write one that you do like.
Believe me always your friend,
Sidney Lanier.
The answer to this letter, giving a detailed criticism of the poem,
was very helpful to Lanier. Judge Bleckley is a man of much cultivation,
and is widely known throughout Georgia as at once one of
the leading lawyers of the State and a man who can in his leisure moments
engage in literary work which, though not published,
gives evidence of imagination and taste. Lanier was wise enough
to accept most of his criticism: the revised form of the poem
compared with the first form shows a great many changes,
and is striking evidence of Lanier's power to improve his work.
Judge Bleckley's characterization of "Corn" so accurately describes it
that his words may be quoted here: "It presents four pictures;
three of them landscapes and one a portrait. You paint the woods,
a cornfield, and a worn-out hill. These are your landscapes.
And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious, unthrifty cotton-planter,
who always spends his crop before he has made it, borrows on heavy interest
to carry himself over from year to year, wears out his land,
meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West.
Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person
[the cornstalk is Lanier's symbol of the poet], and you give its poetry
with many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable life.
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