Meet Our July 2009
Feature Poet
William Cullen Bryant
(1794 - 1878)
An American romantic poet,
journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Bryant
developed an interest in poetry early in life. Under his father's
tutelage, he emulated Alexander Pope and other Neo-Classic British
poets. The Embargo, a savage attack on President Thomas Jefferson
published in 1808, reflected Dr. Bryant's Federalist political views.
The first edition quickly sold out—partly because of the publicity
earned by the poet's young age—and a second, expanded edition, which
included Bryant's translation of Classical verse, was printed. The
youth wrote little poetry while preparing to enter Williams College as
a sophomore, but upon leaving Williams after a single year and then
beginning to read law, he regenerated his passion for poetry through
encounter with the English pre-Romantics and, particularly, William
Wordsworth.
Thanatopsis (meditation on death), his most famous
poem, was submitted for publication by his father who took some pages
of verse from his son's desk and submitted them to the North American
Review in 1817.
While striving to build a legal career, he married Frances Fairchild.
Soon after, having received an invitation to address the Harvard
University Phi Beta Kappa Society at the school's August commencement,
Bryant spent months working on "The Ages," a panorama in verse of the
history of civilization, culminating in the establishment of the United
States. That poem led a collection, entitled Poems, which he arranged
to publish on the same trip to Cambridge. For that book, he added sets
of lines at the beginning and end of "Thanatopsis." His career as a
poet was launched. Even so, it was not until 1832, when an expanded
Poems was published in the U.S. and, with the assistance of Washington
Irving, in Britain, that he won recognition as America's leading poet.
As a writer, Bryant was an early advocate of American literary
nationalism, and his own poetry focusing on nature as a metaphor for
truth established a central pattern in the American literary
tradition. His poetry has been described as being "of a thoughtful,
meditative character, and makes but slight appeal to the mass of
readers".
~ Read the selected work of William Cullen Bryant ~
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