William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 - June 12, 1878), who achieved literary fame at an early age after writing the poem Thanatopsis went on to become one of the most infuential journalists of the 19th century as editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post, a career that spanned fifty years. In addition to his contribution to romantic poetry his essays promoted liberal causes and profoundly shaped American thought and politics in the nineteenth century. He was a widely read, and popular figure of the era, and in his later years served as president of the New York Homeopathic Society.[1]

Historian, Vernon Louis Parrington, author of Main Currents in American Thought (1927) called him "the father of nineteenth-century American journalism as well as the father of nineteenth-century American poetry."

Life

Youth and education

Bryant was born in Cummington, Massachusetts 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. Although of Calvinist heritage, his father broke with tradition joining the more liberal denomination of Unitarianism. However, the Bryant family was united in their zeal for Federalist politics, a party headed by Alexander Hamilton in the late eighteenth century. (Federalists, who believed in a strong national government, were also pro-British.)

Encouraged by his father to write poetry, the young neophyte penned a Federalist satire on then President Thomas Jefferson called The Embargo (1808). Jefferson was not only a leader of the Democratic-Republicans (1797), a party that opposed the Federalists, but he also upheld an embargo on trade with Britain. The poem was published by his father, then a Massachusetts state legislator. In later years, as a firmly established liberal, Bryant put distance between himself and the piece and it was never reprinted in any of his poetry collections.

In 1810 he entered Williams College, but left after a year. He furthered his education by studying with a lawyer near Cummington as this was an established practice at that time. He was admitted to the bar in 1815 at the age of twenty.

William Cullen Bryant Homestead, Cummington, Massachusetts, (2006)

From 1816 to 1825 he practiced law in Plainfield and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, but felt ill-suited for the law profession as "he would be troubled when he witnessed injustice in the court system and could not correct wrongs done to those whom he believed innocent."

Influences and Poetry

"Thanatopsis," (literally "view of death") his most famous poem, was written when he was only 18 years of age. The poem's underlying theme which equates man's mortality with nature's transience is noted for being "un-Christian-like" for its time. In form and tone it reflects the influence of Engish "graveyard" poets such as Thomas Gray and the neoclassic poet Alexander Pope. Soon after writing "Thanatopsis" Bryant was influenced by romantic British poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Many of Bryant's poems reflect his love for nature. Like the Romantics, he saw nature as a vital force in man's life. Poems written in that vein include: "Green River," "A Winter Piece," "The Death of Flowers" and "The Prairies."

"Thanatopsis," although mistakenly attributed to his father initially, was published by the North American Review in 1817 and well received. Its closing stanza advises one on the threshhold of death to:

So live, that, when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan that moves

To that mysterious realm where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave —

Like one that draws the drapery of his couch

About him and lies down to pleasant dreams.

On January 11, 1821, His first book entitled, simply Poems was published in 1821 and contains his longest poem, "The Ages," consisting of thirty-five Spenserian stanzas, tracing the evolution of western civilization.

From the sixth stanza written in Iambic Pentameter:

Look on this beautiful world and read the truth

In her fair page; see, every season brings

New change to her of everlasting youth;

Still the green soil with joyous living things

Swarms; the wide air is full of joyous wings;

And myriads still are happy in the sleep

Of Ocean's azure gulfs and where he flings

The restless surge. Eternal Love doth keep

In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep.

Like other writers of the era, Bryant was seeking a uniquely singular American voice with his writing that was set apart from the culture of the mother country, England. In a lecture before the New York Athenaeum Society (1826) he said that poetic models of the past "which the poet chooses to follow should be used only as guides to his own originality." Bryant felt that although America did not have the historical and cultural heritage to draw upon as in England a poet should draw on "the best the young country has to offer." By 1932 Bryant had accomplished this goal himself, when with the assistance of the already established literary figure Washington Irving- who helped him published Poems in England - he won recognition as America's leading poet.

Marriage and Editorial career

in 1825, he was hired as editor, first of the New-York Review, then of the United States Review and Literary Gazette. 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).[2] 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.

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. 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.

File:Swanson5920a.jpg

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

Bryant died in 1878 of complications from an accidental fall. 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 his honor.

Legacy

Although he is now thought of as a New Englander, 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. It would be difficult to find a sector of the city's life that he did not work to improve.

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. Yet his literary reputation began to fade in the decade after the nineteenth century's midpoint, and the rise of the new poets in the twentieth century not only cast Bryant into the shadows but made him an example of all that was wrong with poetry. Wrapped together with the "Fireside Poets", he was discarded as a poet of sentimental trash.

A recently-published book, 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 important, it perceives a poet of great technical sophistication who was a progenitor of Walt Whitman, to whom he was a mentor.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• "Willam Cullen Bryant." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• "William Cullen Bryant." Business Leader Profiles for Students. Vol. 1 Gale Research, 1999. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice by Frank Gado ISBN 1584656190
• William Cullen Bryant by Charles H. Brown ISBN 9780684123707

External links

• Mr. Lincoln and Friends: William Cullen Bryant
• Essay on William Cullen Bryant by Wynn Yarborough
• Works by William Cullen Bryant. Project Gutenberg
• Selected Poems and Songs by William Cullen Bryant
• William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Cummington, Mass.

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