For on thy cheeks the glow is spread With words of shame And taunts of scorn they join thy name. Dr. Bryant embraced the pro-British partys position, especially because his rationalist creed induced him to see menace in the embargo: an impoverished New York and New England, he feared, would be prey to Jacobin mob rule. America is a largely political work, with much of the poem consisting of various accusations . In prayer services he conducted for his family every morning and every evening, he made certain that religious precepts informed the Bryant childrens upbringing. For on thy cheeks the glow is spread The poetry of his middle age, however, lacked the vibrancy of his early work. On returning home to close his office in Great Barrington, he saw Charles, who reported to his brother Henry in New York that every muscle of his face teemed with happiness. Mortality crowded Bryants mind in 1813. By spring, they were lending assistance to complex negotiations that would make him the editor of a merged journal, the New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine. When Peter Bryant, elected as representative to the state legislature in 1806, conveyed the political passions of Boston in his letters and his trips home to Cummington, Cullen absorbed the excitement, styling his juvenile understanding according to the fathers Federalist partisanship. While his letters to former fellow law students pumped them for news of the lovely young ladies he had left behind in Bridgewater, he was scouting local entertainments; at Christmas time, he met Frances Fairchild, a 19-year-old orphan with a remarkably frank expression, an agreeable figure, a dainty foot, and pretty hands, and the sweetest smile I had ever seen. By March, in writing a message of congratulation to a recent groom, Bryant worried aloud about his many unlucky reflections and feelings of secret horrour at the idea of connecting my future fortunes with those of any woman on earth, but those very tremors attested the intensity of his desire to wed Fanny. The law is a hag, Charles wrote to his friend; besides, there are tricks in practice which would perpetually provoke disgust. Two Sedgwick brothers lived in New York City and sought to convince Bryant to relocate where any description of talent may find not only occupation but diversity of application. Meanwhile, Dana was growing concerned that Bryant, enmeshed in his practice and local political life, would let his talent sleep.. When a rift over succession to the editorship at the North American Review led Dana to resign, this dedicated advocate for the new Romantic poetry started his own publication, The Idle Man; even though the two had not yet met, Dana assigned a high priority to Bryants participation in the endeavor. Beginning with patriotic invocation of the Revolution and concluding with a charge to Keep bright mansions ever in our eyes, / Press towrds the mark and seize the glorious prize, it rapidly became a standard selection for school recitations in the region. A week later, a stroke paralyzed one side of his body, and he became comatose. While in Great Barrington, on advice from the Sedgwicks, Bryant had aborted a political farce, his one attempt at writing for the stage, yet his interest subsisted. Written by Timothy Sexton "The Father of American Song" produced his first volume of poetry in 1821. Addressing Jefferson as the scorn of every patriot name, / The countrys ruin, and her councils shame, he cited cowardice before perfidious Gaul and the rumors of a dalliance with the sable Sally Hemings as reasons for Jefferson to resign the presidential chair and search, with curious eye, for horned frogs, / Mongst the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs. Dr. Bryant proudly urged his son to extend his efforts, and when the legislator returned to Boston after the holiday recess, he circulated the poem among his Federalist friendsincluding a poet of minor reputation who joined the father in editing and polishing the work. And so, five days after his fourteenth birthday, Cullen traveled fifty miles to board with his uncle, a clergyman who was to tutor him in Latin. Although he left for Worthington, six miles from home, to begin to learn the law a month after turning 17, his longing for Yale persisted. As Peter Bryants closest intellectual companion, his son was profoundly affected by this departure from conventional tenets. Their sharpness, ere he is aware. Had he thought little of these efforts? As an erudite American, he had immersed himself in the ancients, a classical nurture reflected in his admiration for. National economic woes further hurt revenues, and the, Financial stability made more active pursuit of his diverse interests possible. His experience of the nations great rivers, and then of the awesome sweep of prairie stirred him profoundly. National economic woes further hurt revenues, and the Evening Post did not regain its financial footing until 1839. One critic summed up his career by comparing him disadvantageously to the great poets of the ageWilliam Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennysonyet he took care to comment that though the American could not match their idiosyncratic strengths, he was the one among all our contemporaries who has written the fewest things carelessly, and the most things well.. Bryant, William Cullen, 1794-1878. Once his father dies, however, grief causes the argument to collapse. As an erudite American, he had immersed himself in the ancients, a classical nurture reflected in his admiration for Alexander Pope and the other 18th-century British paragons of the Augustan style in poetry. During the same period, Bryant also fell under the sway of the so-called Graveyard Poets. The similarity was appropriate: Irving brought international legitimacy to American fiction; Bryant alerted the English-speaking world to an American voice in poetry. Even so, Bryant was a beloved and highly influential figure. At once, new vexations arose: William Colemans widow demanded immediate payment from him on the mortgage she held for the newspaper, and the Jackson administration failed to make good a promised diplomatic appointment. The shaping of Bryants mind and personality owed much to his family circumstances in Cummington, Massachusetts, a small village in the Berkshire hills carved from the forest scantly a generation before his birth. As a man of letters, too, though no longer consequential, he remained active. Though still a nominal Congregationalistwho, moreover, continued to pay his tithehe had rejected the core of Christian dogma, but these verses, while no more traditional than the Unitarian church, show him edging toward accommodation with conventional belief.). William Cullen Bryants reserve and his guarded nature throughout life undoubtedly were schooled by the familial constraints of his one home until he departed to practice law at 22. Composed, produced, and remixed: the greatest hits of poems about music. That Bryant never wrote another tale is conventionally attributed to lack of seriousness about the genre and to the poor quality of his efforts. Yet its motive was not saturnine: Bryant was seeking to convince himself to accept death as an inevitable aspect of the mutability that lends wild and strange delight to life., In March 1820, Peter Bryants lungs filled with blood as his son sat beside him, watching him die. Dr. Bryant embraced the pro-British partys position, especially because his rationalist creed induced him to see menace in the embargo: an impoverished New York and New England, he feared, would be prey to Jacobin mob rule. Once he had counted on his facility as the key to winning fame; now he wrote seeking clarity for himself. The newspapers demands on Bryants attention and energy during the 1830s had left none of either for poetry, but once the Evening Post was again profitable, he resumed writing verse. The West Wind, the least of the group in both reach and achievement, moves a simple thought through seven undistinguished quatrains. Bryant was an obvious choice. But neither the recollection nor the legend is supported by evidence. Ambitiously intended as a national publication, to be issued simultaneously in Boston and New York, it lost its first coeditor almost at once, and his successor, a Classics scholar working as a librarian at Harvard, quickly proved that the relationship with his partner in New York would not run smoothly. Thanatopsis made its author, Willian Cullen Bryant, one of the most notable American poets of the nineteenth century. Now let's go back to line 1. I. In April, his best childhood friend had coaxed Bryant into supplying a poem for his wedding, even though it meant breaking his pledge to abstain from writing verse while studying law. Lo! Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair'd in the adamant of Time. At the graveside, the minister recited excerpts from Bryants poems about death, and schoolchildren tossed flowers on his coffin. Had his intended profession inspired ambition, he might have welcomed its challenges as a means of escape from dejection, but law offered him nothing more than the prospect of a living, burdened by wearying triviality. A Song of Our Nation by Anonymous. Accounts of these journeys, too, appeared in the Evening Post, and in 1869, 16 years later, were published as Letters from the East. In Plainfield, he wrote to a friend, I found the people rather bigoted in their notions, and almost wholly governed by the influence of a few individuals who looked upon my coming among them, with a great deal of jealousy. By June of 1816, having despaired of ever greatly enlarging the sphere of my business, he began investigating the prospect of joining an established practice in Great Barrington, and in October he moved to the Housatonic Valley town. The next spring, Bryant accepted an invitation from Charles Leupp, an art patron and Bryants longtime associate in the Sketch Club, to be his travel companion. Western Massachusetts in that period generally eschewed the liberal religious ideas that fanned out from Boston; its dour orthodoxies looked to the more conservative Calvinism of New Haven and the Albany area of upstate New York. In 1842 he published The Fountain and Other Poems, all written after his return from Europe. His youth had come to an end quite different from his expectations; dispirited, he wrote a valediction to visions of verse and of fame. He had mixed with the world and sacrificed his purity; now he could only hope that those bright visions might sometimes return, and in mercy awaken / The glories ye showed to his earlier years. He was all of 21 years old. Except for Benjamin Franklin, no American writer had managed to support himself and his family with his pen, however meanly, and verse was patently an occupation for idlers. Two years later, Bryant and Leupp were again off for Liverpool, then wended south through Paris, Genoa, and Naples before arriving in Egypt for a four-month exploration of the cities of the Ottoman Empire. The thoroughly Wordsworthian Winter Scenes (later retitled A Winter Piece) suffers from comparison to its model in tilting much more toward recollection than emotion; that notwithstanding, it is good enough to be mistaken for portions of The Prelude, which would not appear in print for another three decades. Young Cullen, a captive of both his fathers politics and his enthusiasm for Augustan poetry, fused the two in scathing verse. The two sailed to Savannah, then to Charleston, from where, after visiting Bryants good friend, the novelist William Gilmore Simms, they embarked for Cuba. The pivotal poem, which he would substantially revise for much of a decade, was , Relying on Bryants casual recall, much later in his life, editors have frequently assigned the middle section, Alas, Sir, the Muse was my first love and the, A curious happenstance in Boston, however, would work to weaken Themiss hold. The first issue featured a poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck, a New Yorker of rising reputation whose contribution, Marco Bozaris, about a Greek revolutionary hero, advanced a popular, emotional cause to which Bryant had pledged himself while in Great Barrington. To be sure, he was primarily a poet, and the first annual did have something of the character of a lark. Because the poems submitted were in two different handwritings, the editors assumed for many months following their September publication that they were the work of two different poets: father and son. Ironically, an immediate fame beyond his imaginings awaited. But these explanations are misleading. In addition, two causes for which he had crusaded elected him to their presidencies: the American Copyright Club (which he addressed in 1843) and the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death. If, given his age, the pose he struck in a poem composed in 1807 was patently absurdAh me! Ebenezer Snell, a deacon in the Congregationalist church, studied theological writers and was as intractable in his interpretation of scripture as in his rulings as a local magistrate. America by William Cullen Bryant | Poemist William Cullen Bryant November 3, 1794 - June 12, 1878 / Boston America OH mother of a mighty race, Yet lovely in thy youthful grace! Leaving his family behind this time, he spent two months in England and Scotland, where he visited the elderly Wordsworth and virtually all the noted writers, then proceeded through most of the continent for the next three months. A lifelong homoeopathhe had been taught herbal medicine by his fatherhe published Popular Considerations on Homoeopathia and agreed to head the New York Homoeopathic Society at the conclusion of 1841. they stretch, And healing sympathy, that steals away. Amazon.com: William Cullen Bryant: Author of America: 9780791474686: Muller, . His mentor there, catching him scrutinizing Lyrical Ballads, warned against repetition of the offense, and Bryant, fearful of being sent away, steeled himself to obedience for a year. The Lunch, as it was known, became the hub of Bryants social life. Within a 12-month period, Bryant contributed 23 poems to the Literary Gazette, 17 under the terms of his agreement with Parsons and six more in 1825, when Bryant shed his commitment after a new editor, trying to economize, offered half the stipend for half the number of lines. That same month Williams College awarded him an honorary masters degree. The elder dames, thy haughty peers, Admire and hate thy blooming years. Typically manifesting this quality were the three annuals and a collection of tales, all generated as exercises in camaraderie. Society at the conclusion of 1841. The worst blow fell in 1866, when his wife died after a prolonged agony. Alexander Hamilton had founded the New-York Evening Post in 1801 as an organ for his Federalist party, but as the party weakened, William Coleman, the original editor, slipped from Federalist principles. A second essay, On the Use of Trisyllabic Feet in Iambic Verse, published in September 1819, reworked material possibly first drafted when he was 16 or 17 and trying to shake free of Popes Neoclassical cadence; even so, it did much to bolster his credentials as a scholar of metrics. In his poem he says, "unnoticed by the livingand no friend." I believe that he was trying to have people comprehend that even if you are unnoticed and have no friends that doesn't change where you'll end up in life. In the spring, Bryants boosters from the North American had persuaded Harvards Phi Beta Kappa Society to invite him to read at the August commencement (incidentally informing him, to his surprise, of his election to membership four years earlier). And to qualify as a husband, he knew, would require paying less attention to the Muse. In fact, such poetic glories as he feared would smother under the workaday routine were in gestation. By spring, they were lending assistance to complex negotiations that would make him the editor of a merged journal, the, Though unconvinced that he was suited to sitting in judgment on books, Bryant applied himself to the task most creditably; however, the second part, When Bryant had abandoned the law for a New York editorship, he said he was uncertain whether he was exchanging one shabby business for another, and after the failure of two journals, the second of which cost him an investment of almost half a years salary, one might have expected regret over his choice. M. Evrard insisted that he attend mass for his souls salvation and tried to convert him to Catholicism, yet Bryant, respecting the mans ebullient nature and good heart, took it all in good stride, and when Fanny and their daughter moved to the city, they joined the crowded Evrard household for about a month. His first two tales, inspired by Washington Irving, may have been conceived by an editor pressed for material to fill his magazine, but they nonetheless express in prose the vision for American literature he outlined in his poetry lectures. Adding a section to the house provided accommodation both for Bryants medical office and for the four more children born from 1802 through 1807. The essay served not only as a cornerstone of our literary history but also as a thoughtful, temperate exordium to the many arguments for American literary nationalism about to erupt. Published in 1864 for his 70th birthday, Thirty Poems sealed Bryants reputation as a Fireside Poet: augustly unassailable, yet fusty. 1821, however, was its ideal moment. American literature was showing its first signs of maturity, but it still missed a poet whose work could stand comparison with British rivals; The Ages nominated Bryant as that poet. This strain to develop a facade that was untrue to his personal reality only heightened his sense of alienation. The Evening Wind by William Cullen Bryant Poet and editor William Cullen Bryant stood among the most celebrated figures in the frieze of 19th-century America. XXII before sending it to the printer during the first weeks of 1809 as one of the supplementary poems in the second edition of. Worship stressed death and the power of the devil, and perhaps because of the boys vulnerability to illness and chronic severe headaches, he pondered mortality, even at his tender age, and saw Gods image as cast in a mold of fear and gloom. William Cullen Bryant's sonnet, "To an American Painter Departing for Europe" meet these criteria. In prayer services he conducted for his family every morning and every evening, he made certain that religious precepts informed the Bryant childrens upbringing. Instead, in spite of an onerous workload, it was proving a heady adventure. The observations of plants and flowers, of birds and sky, and of brooks and rolling fields that occupy so much of his verse were trained by the boys delight in investigating his surroundings. Bryant had also been veering toward Democratic positions in other areas, and he admired Andrew Jackson and felt personally drawn to his good friend Pauldings good friend Martin Van Burenall of which made for comfortable relations between the notoriously fiery Coleman and his assistant editor. The pivotal poem, which he would substantially revise for much of a decade, was Thanatopsis.. Public service was not permitted to exclude all other interests, however. He was the second son of doctor and state legislator Peter Bryant and his wife Sarah Snell, whose ancestors were passengers on the Mayflower.. At thirteen, Bryant wrote "The Embargo," a satirical poem calling for the resignation of President Thomas Jefferson. Upon his arrival, he boarded with a French family so that he might polish the language he had first studied with his father. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878), "Thanatopsis," North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, September 1817, Volume V, Number XV | Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History Free photo gallery. Background Information. In late life, Bryant the editor and political sage had eclipsed the poet in the publics mind. Full Transcript. Again they traveled to major cities, this time including Madrid, but the focus of the trip was Italy. If, in itself, the stipend he earned was not sufficient, it showed that it might at last be possible to earn a living in the publications world. 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