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William Cullen Bryant

 
Biography: William Cullen Bryant
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The American poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) helped introduce European romanticism into American poetry. As an editor, he championed liberal causes. He was one of the most influential and popular figures of mid-19th-century America.

William Cullen Bryant was born on Nov. 3, 1794, in Cummington, Mass. His well-established New England family was staunchly Federalist in politics and Calvinist in religion. Encouraged to write poetry by his father, a physician of wide learning, the boy reflected in his earliest poems his family's political and religious attitudes. Bryant's Federalist satire on Thomas Jefferson, The Embargo, or Sketches of the Times (1808), by a "Youth of Thirteen" was published through his father's influence. In later years the liberal, democratic, Unitarian Bryant understandably wished to forget this youthful indiscretion, and he did not reprint it in any of his collections.

"Thanatopsis" and Other Poems

Bryant entered Williams College in 1810 and left after a year. In 1811 he wrote the first draft of his best-known poem, "Thanatopsis" (literally, view of death), reflecting the influence of English "graveyard" poets such as Thomas Gray.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of "Thanotopsis" is its anti-Christian, stoical view of death. There is no heaven or hell beyond the grave; death ends life, and that is all: "Thine individual being, shalt thou go/ To mix forever with the elements,/ To be a brother to the insensible rock/ And to the sluggish clod…. " Published in 1817, the poem was a marked success; it was reprinted in 1821 in the final, revised version familiar today.

A few years later Bryant modified his attitude to death in "To a Waterfowl," in which a "Power" (God) is omnipresent and beneficent. The later English poet Matthew Arnold considered this to be the finest short poem in the English language. As the 1876 poem "The Flood of Years" makes clear, Bryant held this view of death to the end of his life.

Shortly after Bryant wrote the first draft of "Thanotopsis," he came under the influence of the romantic British poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the opening lines of "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," Bryant conveyed a love of nature that he retained throughout his career: "Thou wilt find nothing here [in nature]/ Of all that pained thee in the haunts of men,/ And made thee loathe thy life." However, like Wordsworth and other romantics, Bryant saw the world of nature less as an escape from the evils of life in the city than as a positive, vital force in itself. He explored this idea in other poems of this period, such as "The Yellow Violet," "I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion," "Green River," and "A Winter Piece," and later in "A Forest Hymn," "The Death of Flowers," and "The Prairies."

Following his year at Williams College, Bryant read for the law and in 1815 was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. From 1816 to 1825 he practiced law in Great Barrington, Mass. He also kept up his literary activities, writing poetry and essays. In 1821 he published his first volume, Poems, and read his Phi Beta Kappa poem "The Ages" at Harvard. That same year he married Frances Fairchild, his "Fairest of the Rural Maids."

In 1826 Bryant became assistant editor of the liberal New York Evening Post and in 1829 editor in chief. He served in this capacity for 50 years.

Poetic Theories

Bryant formulated his poetic theories in a series of four lectures on poetry, which he delivered in 1826 before the New York Athenaeum Society (they were published in 1884). He stressed, "The most beautiful poetry is that which takes the strongest hold of the feelings…. Important, therefore, as may be the office of the imagination [and of understanding, as well] in poetry, the great spring of poetry is emotion." (He expressed a similar view in the 1864 poem "The Poet.") Models from the past which the poet chooses to follow should be used only as guides to his own originality. While acknowledging that America's historical and cultural past was not as rich for the creation of poetry as England's, Bryant nevertheless felt that when America did produce a great poet he would draw on the best the young country had to offer.

The Editor

As an editor espousing liberal causes, Bryant had considerable impact on the life of New York and of the nation. Typical of his editorials was "The Right of Workmen to Strike" (1836), in which he upheld the workers' right to collective bargaining and ridiculed the prosecution of labor unions: "Can any thing be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity or justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix … the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition."

Similarly, Bryant was firmly committed to many other liberal causes of the day, including the antislavery movement, the "free-soil" concept, and free trade among nations. He also helped in the formation of the new Republican party in 1855.

Bryant published nine volumes of poetry from 1832 on. He also translated the Iliad (1870) and the Odyssey (1871-1872). He died in New York City on June 12, 1878.

Though Bryant was not a great poet, his poems were much admired in his own time, and a number of them are eminently readable today. As the guiding force of the Evening Post, he left his mark not only on the city his liberal paper served but on the nation as well.

Further Reading

Parke Godwin, Bryant's son-in-law, edited the standard editions of both The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant (2 vols., 1883) and Bryant's Prose Writings (2 vols., 1884). The best one-volume edition of the poems is Henry C. Sturges and Richard Henry Stoddard, eds., The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant (1903). The standard biography of Bryant is Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence (2 vols., 1883). A more balanced assessment is Harry H. Peckham, Gotham Yankee: A Biography of William Cullen Bryant (1950). Tremaine McDowell edited and wrote an excellent introduction to William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections (1935). Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922), discusses Bryant as an editor. Recommended for general background are Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets, from the Puritans to the Present (1968).

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: William Cullen Bryant
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William Cullen Bryant, detail of an oil painting by Daniel Huntington, 1866; in the Brooklyn Museum …
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William Cullen Bryant, detail of an oil painting by Daniel Huntington, 1866; in the Brooklyn Museum … (credit: Courtesy of The Brooklyn Museum, New York)
(born Nov. 3, 1794, Cummington, Mass., U.S. — died June 12, 1878, New York, N.Y.) U.S. poet. At age 17 Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis," a meditation on nature and death that remains his best-known poem; influenced by deism, it in turn influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Admitted to the bar at age 21, he spent nearly 10 years as an attorney, a profession he hated. His Poems (1821), including "To a Waterfowl," secured his reputation. In 1825 he moved to New York City, where for almost 50 years (1829 – 78) he was editor in chief of the Evening Post, which he transformed into an organ of progressive thought.

For more information on William Cullen Bryant, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: William Cullen Bryant
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Bryant, William Cullen (brī'ənt), 1794-1878, American poet and newspaper editor, b. Cummington, Mass. The son of a learned and highly respected physician, Bryant was exposed to English poetry in his father's vast library. As a boy he became devoted to the New England countryside and was a keen observer of nature. In his early poems such as "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," and "The Yellow Violet," all written before he was 21, he celebrated the majesty of nature in a style that was influenced by the English romantics but also reflected a personal simplicity and dignity. Admitted to the bar in 1815 after a year at Williams and private study, Bryant practiced law in Great Barrington, Mass., until 1825, when he went to New York City. By that time he was already known as a poet and critic. He became associate editor of the New York Evening Post in 1826, and from 1829 to his death he was part owner and editor in chief. An industrious and forthright editor of a highly literate paper, he was a defender of human rights and an advocate of free trade, abolition of slavery, and other reforms. He also holds an important place in literature as the earliest American theorist of poetry. In his Lectures on Poetry (delivered 1825; published 1884) and other critical essays he stressed the values of simplicity, original imagination, and morality. During his later career Bryant traveled widely, made many public speeches, and continued to write a few poems (e.g., "The Death of the Flowers," "To the Fringed Gentian," and "The Battle-Field"). His blank verse translation of the Iliad appeared in 1870, that of the Odyssey in 1872.

Bibliography

See biographies by P. Godwin (2 vol., 1883; repr. 1967), J. Bigelow (1890, repr. 1970), H. H. Peckham (1950, repr. 1971), and C. H. Brown (1971).

Works: Works by William Cullen Bryant
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(1794-1878)

1808"The Embargo; or, Sketches of the Time, a Satire; by a Youth of Thirteen." A verse satire against Jefferson's trade restrictions. Bryant's father publishes the poem in pamphlet form, and it wins regional popularity. Its success and the fact that Dr. Bryant wanted his son to receive credit for the poem would lead to a second volume of poems in 1809.
1815"To a Waterfowl." A very popular and frequently anthologized poem expressing the poet's doubt and uncertainty, relieved when the sight of a bird flying alone across the sky inspires him to believe in the guidance of a divine power. It would be first published in the North American Review in March 1818 and called "the best short poem in the language" by Matthew Arnold.
1817"Thanatopsis." A meditation on death influenced by the reading of Thomas Gray, Henry Kirke White, and Robert Southey, and first published in the North American Review as fragments that the editors combined under the heading "Thanatopsis." Many readers were skeptical that such a young man could manage such sophisticated and powerful verse (Bryant was not yet twenty when he began to write it).
1821Poems. A collection of eight poems issued by Richard Henry Dana, Edward Channing, and Willard Phillips, who were impressed with Bryant's "The Ages." Delivered at the Harvard commencement, "The Ages" consists of Spenserian stanzas surveying the history of mankind and presenting a positive outlook for the future. Poems includes it and the last major revision of "Thanatopsis." Although the volume does not sell well, it brings critical acclaim and publicly confirms Bryant as one of the finest American poets.
1824"Monument Mountain." Bryant's popular blank-verse poem tells the story of an Indian princess who kills herself after falling in love with her cousin.
1825Lectures on Poetry. Bryant's series of four lectures delivered at the New York Athenaeum puts forward his theory of poetry, influenced by the English Romantic poets, and his denial of assertions that America is lacking in poetic material, that the American language is too primitive for poetry, and that American society is too materialistic and pragmatic to support poetry.
1825"A Forest Hymn." A blank-verse nature poem exhibiting Bryant's beliefs about the universe. The poet in the forest expresses faith in a personal creator, but the poem is also suggestive of pantheism and reminiscent of Wordsworth's early verse. It is considered one of Bryant's best poems.
1831"Song of Marion's Men." Considered among Bryant's best lyric poetry, the work commends Francis Marion (1732-1795), the Revolutionary soldier known for his guerrilla tactics in South Carolina. The poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman would declare in his 1864 essay "Mr. Bryant's 'Thirty Poems'"" that the poem "has stirred the pulses of every school-boy in the land."
1842The Fountain and Other Poems. Bryant responds to persistent requests for a longer work with a collection of parts of a larger work of grand design that he never completed.
1844The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems. A collection of ten poems, some of which had previously been published, that the United States Democratic Review credits with "beauty and simplicity."
1850Letters of a Traveller; or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America. This collection of unrevised letters written over fifteen years of travel wins immediate popularity with a public hungry for travel literature. The book would be reprinted the following year as The Picturesque Souvenir, Letters of a Traveller, and in 1859 a second series of Letters of a Traveller would be published.
1864Thirty Poems. Bryant gathers some of his Civil War verses in a slight collection, which does not add appreciably to his reputation but generally confirms his status as a poet whose best work is behind him.

Quotes By: William C. Bryant
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Quotes:

"Pain dies quickly, and lets her weary prisoners go; the fiercest agonies have shortest reign."

"Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase are fruits of innocence and blessedness."

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods and meadows brown and sear."

"Weep not that the world changes -- did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep."

"Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger."

"Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness --a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion."

See more famous quotes by William C. Bryant

Wikipedia: William Cullen Bryant
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William Cullen Bryant
3/4 profile head-and-shoulders monochrome portrait of bearded old man
Print of Bryant, c. 1876
Born November 3, 1794
Died June 12, 1878
Occupation Poet, journalist, and editor
Nationality U.S.
Notable work(s) "Thanatopsis"
Literature portal

William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.

Contents

Youth and education

Bryant was born on November 3, 1794,[1] in a log cabin near Cummington, Massachusetts; the home of his birth is today marked with a plaque.[2] He was the second son of Peter Bryant, a doctor and later a state legislator, and Sarah Snell. His maternal ancestry traces back to passengers on the Mayflower; his father's, to colonists who arrived about a dozen years later.

Bryant and his family moved to a new home when he was two years old. The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, his boyhood home, is now a museum. After just two years at Williams College, he studied law in Worthington and Bridgewater in Massachusetts, and he was admitted to the bar in 1815. He then began practicing law in nearby Plainfield, walking the seven miles from Cummington every day. On one of these walks, in December 1815, he noticed a single bird flying on the horizon; the sight moved him enough to write "To a Waterfowl".[3]

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.

Poetry

Although "Thanatopsis", his most famous poem, has been said to date from 1811, it is much more probable that Bryant began its composition in 1813, or even later[citation needed]. What is known about its publication is that his father took some pages of verse from his son's desk and submitted them, along with his own work, to the North American Review in 1817. The Review was edited by Edward Tyrrel Channing at the time and, upon receiving it, read the poem to his assistant, who immediately exclaimed, "That was never written on this side of the water!"[4] Someone at the North American joined two of the son's discrete fragments, gave the result the Greek-derived title Thanatopsis (meditation on death), mistakenly attributed it to the father, and published it. With all the errors,[clarification needed] it was well-received, and soon Bryant was publishing poems with some regularity, including "To a Waterfowl" in 1821.

On January 11, 1821,[5] Bryant, still striving to build a legal career, 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.

His poetry has been described as being "of a thoughtful, meditative character, and makes but slight appeal to the mass of readers."[6]

Editorial career

William Cullen Bryant

Writing poetry could not financially sustain a family. From 1816 to 1825, he practiced law in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and supplemented his income with such work as service as the town's hog reeve. Distaste for pettifoggery and the sometimes absurd judgments pronounced by the courts gradually drove him to break with the profession.

With the help of a distinguished and well-connected literary family, the Sedgwicks, he gained a foothold in New York City, where, in 1825, he was hired as editor, first of the New-York Review, then of the United States Review and Literary Gazette. But the magazines of that day usually enjoyed only an ephemeral life-span. After two years of fatiguing effort to breathe life into periodicals, he became Assistant Editor of the New-York Evening Post, a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton that was surviving precariously. Within two years, he was Editor-in-Chief and a part owner. He remained the Editor-in-Chief for half a century (1828-78). Eventually, the Evening-Post became not only the foundation of his fortune but also the means by which he exercised considerable political power in his city, state, and nation.

Photograph of Bryant by Mathew Brady, c. 1860–65

Ironically, the boy who first tasted fame for his diatribe against Thomas Jefferson and his party became one of the key supporters in the Northeast of that same party under Jackson. Bryant's views, always progressive though not quite populist, in course led him to join the Free Soilers, and when the Free Soil Party became a core of the new Republican Party in 1856, Bryant vigorously campaigned for John Frémont. That exertion enhanced his standing in party councils, and in 1860, he was one of the prime Eastern exponents of Abraham Lincoln, whom he introduced at Cooper Union. (That speech lifted Lincoln to the nomination, and then the presidency.)

Later years

In his last decade, Bryant shifted from writing his own poetry to translating Homer. He assiduously worked on the Iliad and The Odyssey from 1871 to 1874. He is also remembered as one of the principal authorities on homeopathy and as a hymnist for the Unitarian Church—both legacies of his father's enormous influence on him.

Bryant died in 1878 of complications from an accidental fall suffered after participating in a Central Park ceremony honoring Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini.

Critical response

"Cedarmere", William Cullen Bryant's estate in Roslyn, NY

Poet and literary critic Thomas Holley Chivers said that the "only thing [Bryant] ever wrote that may be called Poetry is 'Thanatopsis', which he stole line for line from the Spanish. The fact is, that he never did anything but steal—as nothing he ever wrote is original."[7] Contemporary critic Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand, praised Bryant and specifically the poem "June" in his essay "The Poetic Principle":

"The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuous—nothing could be more melodious. The intense melancholy which seems to well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet's cheerful sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul—while there is the truest poetic elevation in the thrill... the impression left is one of a pleasurable sadness."[8]

Legacy

Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits depicts William Cullen Bryant with Thomas Cole, in this quintessentially Hudson River School work.
State of William Cullen Bryant in Bryant Park adjacent to the New York Public Library

In 1884, New York City's Reservoir Square, at the intersection of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, was renamed Bryant Park in his honor. The city later named a public high school in Long Island City, Queens in his honor.

Although he is now thought of as a New Englander[citation needed], Bryant, for most of his lifetime, was thoroughly a New Yorker—and a very dedicated one at that. He was a major force behind the idea that became Central Park, as well as a leading proponent of creating the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had close affinities with the Hudson River School of art and was an intimate friend of Thomas Cole. He defended the immigrant and, at some financial risk to himself, championed the rights of workers to form labor unions.

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.

A recently-published book[9], however, argues that a reassessment is long overdue. It finds great merit in a couple of short stories Bryant wrote while trying to build interest in periodicals he edited. More importantly, it perceives a poet of great technical sophistication who was a progenitor of Walt Whitman, to whom he was a mentor[9].

Further reading

References

Notes

  1. ^ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 48. ISBN 086576008X
  2. ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 46. ISBN 0195031865
  3. ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 56. ISBN 0195031865
  4. ^ Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1952: 116.
  5. ^ Vital Records of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850, Gt Barrington, MA: NEHGS, 1904 (online.) His 1878 biographer, Parke Goodwin, confused the issue of the marriage date through a typographical error, as explained here.
  6. ^ Alexander K. McClure, ed (1902). Famous American Statesmen & Orators. VI. New York: F. F. Lovell Publishing Company. pp. 62. 
  7. ^ Parks, Edd Winfield. Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1962: 175.
  8. ^ Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001: 37. ISBN 081604161X
  9. ^ a b Frank Gado, ed (1996). Famous American Statesmen & Orators. New York: Antoca. pp. 198. 

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