Bryant, William Cullen

Bryant, William Cullen (1794–1878), born at Cummington, Mass., was educated at home, at the district schools, and at Williams College. After writing The Embargo (1808), at the age of 14, indignant satires against Jefferson's administration, he wrote “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl,” but left them unpublished while continuing a legal career that lasted to 1825. His fame as a poet dates from the printing of Thanatopsis (1817). In 1821 he read “The Ages” at Harvard as a Phi Beta Kappa poem and published his first mature book of Poems. In 1824–25 he wrote some 20 or 30 poems for the United States Literary Gazette, including “A Forest Hymn,” “Monument Mountain,” Rizpah, and An Indian at the Burial Place of His Fathers, which established him as the leading poet of the U.S. Early in 1825 he became co‐editor of the New York Review and Athenoeum Magazine and then of the New York Evening Post, whose full editorship he assumed in 1829 and held for almost 50 years. By 1840 he had become one of the leading Democratic editors, but his vigorous opposition to slavery brought him into the new Republican party. In 1832 he published a new collection of Poems, which included “The Death of the Flowers,” “To the Fringed Gentian,” “Mutation,” and “The Song of Marion's Men.” Although new additions and other books continued to appear, this edition contains all of the essential Bryant. Throughout he shows certain ideas growing always out of a limited range of emotional responses, and reporting a few aspects of man and nature. He was a poet of nature, and his work is often compared with that of Wordsworth, who profoundly influenced him, but Bryant's God remained ever a Divine Being distinct from His creation. Nature is simply the visible token of God's transcendent beauty and awful power, and thus nature influences man for good. There is a pervading sense of the transiency of earthly things, but he thinks of the somber certainty of the grave, rather than the earlier Puritan obsession with the terrors of hell. Although Bryant's themes were few and his thought not profound, he possessed a simple dignity and an impeccable, restrained style. The Doric nobility and dignity of the poet fitted him well for his translation of the Iliad (1870) and the Odyssey (1871–72), blank‐verse renditions plain in style and simple in movement. His other publications include The Fountain (1842), The White‐Footed Deer (1844), A Forest Hymn (1860), Thirty Poems (1864), Hymns (1869), The Little People of the Snow (1873), Among the Trees (1874), and The Flood of Years (1878). His best prose is found in the discourses on Cooper, Irving, Halleck, and Verplanck, in his Letters of a Traveller (1850; 2nd series, 1859), and in the collected Orations and Addresses (1873).