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Authors
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
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William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss edited The Letters of William Cullen Bryant (1975–92) in six volumes. Earlier biographies are superseded by Charles H. Brown’s William Cullen Bryant (1971) and Albert F. McLean’s William Cullen Bryant (1989). Judith Turner Phair compiled A Bibliography of William Cullen Bryant and His Critics, 1808–1972 (1975). Bryant’s poetry has not been edited according to modern standards, but the edition of his Poetical Works (1878) published at his death is a useful starting point. His newspaper writing had been buried in the files of the New York Evening Post until William Cullen Bryant II republished selected editorials in Power for Sanity (1994). Berrnard Duffey’s Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound (1978) remains provocative.
Bryant was born in the backwoods of Massachusetts and raised by a strict Calvinist father. Under the influence of the British "graveyard poets" and William Wordsworth, who celebrated the majesty of nature, Bryant wrote the first draft of Thanatopsis in 1813 or 1814. This poem won him immediate acclaim when he first published it in 1817. Unfortunately, the life of a poet was not a practical possibility for the young Bryant. He worked as a lawyer and a justice of the peace in Massachusetts until he followed his literary dreams and moved his family to New York City. In New York Bryant began a long and distinguished career in magazine publishing, first as an editor at the New York Review and Atheneum Magazine and then most significantly as editor-in-chief at the Evening Post. His editorials in the Evening Post, focusing on the political events of the day, helped make his newspaper one of the most respected in the country. Later, when Bryant was in his seventies, he completed verse translations of both the Iliad (1870) and the Odyssey (1872) and printed his collected Poems in 1876.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Thanatopsis (1821) and The Prairies (1832) are two of Bryant's best-remembered poems; they are works that make him an exemplary figure in the American Romantic tradition. We see here a dramatic change in the verse being written in the United States -- in how it sounds, in how it moves from one perception to the next, in how it is heard by the reader, and in how it implicitly defines the role of the poet.
1. Thanatopsis is an elegy -- and if you have read other elegies, you know that the conventions of the elegy require it to move from grief into consolation, to come out of the darkness and away from the pain. Bryant gives us an elegy for all of humankind, for all living things. But this also sounds like a soliloquy, like a speech from a Shakespearean protagonist, off by himself or herself, thinking aloud about the human condition. What lines in the poem strike you as sounding especially Shakespearean? Do particular heroes from Shakespeare come to mind? Why? How does this poem find its way out of melancholy? By logic? By intuition? Where does the mood change, and how does it change?
2. The early nineteenth century was an era when landscape painting favored the vast canvas, the panoramic scene, the wild, dark, windswept landscape, and a portentous sky. The cover of NAAL, volume 1, shows such a painting, by Asher Durand -- in fact, the two figures on the rock in the middle distance are Bryant and the American Romantic painter Thomas Cole. Reconsider Thanatopsis as a visual experience. Where do you see painterly moments in the poem?
3. In The Prairies Bryant takes on the role of bard -- a poet who in imaginative ecstasy tells or constructs the history of a people and who connects the present to a heroic past. At this point (Bryant wrote the poem in 1833), no one in America understood the cultures of the Moundbuilders, and Bryant turns to his intuition and his own cultural experiences to create a tale and redeem these monuments from anonymity. Describe his reverie. What heroic tradition and works does he draw upon? Why does he invent a "last survivor" for the Moundbuilders and imagine him intermarrying with the conquerors?
