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.
He practiced law in Plainfield and Great Barrington 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
Bryant had developed an interest in poetry early in life. Under his father's tutelage, he had emulated Alexander Pope and other Neo-Classic British poets.
the English pre-Romantics and, particularly, William Wordsworth.
Thanatopsis
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. What is known 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. 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. For all the errors, it was well received, and soon Bryant was publishing poems with some regularity.
- 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,[1]
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.
Marriage and Editorial career
Then as now, however, writing poetry could not financially sustain a family. From 1816 to 1825, he practiced law in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
in 1825, he was hired as editor, first of the New-York Review, then of the United States Review and Literary Gazette. 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).[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.
Ironically, the boy who first tasted fame for his diatribe against Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican 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. 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.
Notes
ReferencesISBN 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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