WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878)

William Cullen Bryant is usually classed with the Knickerbocker group of writers, but in all of his poetic work that is distinctive he was no more a Knickerbocker than was Whittier. He was a New Englander of the New Englanders, a descendant from several lines of Puritans; he was reared amid the strictest of Puritan ideals, and his poetic art and his outlook upon life were all Puritanic.

He was born among the Berkshire Hills at Cummington, Massachusetts, November 3, 1791. His father, a country doctor, had in his youth seen much of the world as a surgeon on a merchant vessel, and it was from him that art and culture had come into the boy's life. He had gathered a notable collection of books which the young Bryant, a precocious lad, made full use of. At thirteen the boy, fragile and over-intellectual, threatened with consumption, was writing poetry that his father thought worthy of publication in pamphlet form, The Embargo (1809), a satire on Madison's administration, so successful that a second edition was prepared. At fifteen he entered the sophomore class at Williams College, but after two terms he discontinued his course, thinking Yale more fitted to give him the training he required. But his means were limited and after an autumn spent at home, a period of poetical reading and composition, during which he produced the first draught of Thanatopsis' and 'Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,' he turned from the muses and began the study of law. He was admitted to the bar in 1815 and for several years practised his profession with diligence. The publication of Thanatopsis' in The North American Review in September, 1817, placed him at a bound among the recognized poets of America, and led him again to turn to poetry. In 1821 he read The Ages before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, and the same year he issued in book form the poem with the early North American Review lyrics and a few others added. Its success turned his thoughts to a literary career. In 1825 he removed to New York City, and after a year spent in editing small magazines, he became assistant editor and shortly after editor-in-chief of the Daily Evening Post, a position which he held with distinction for half a century.

His distinctively poetic career ended with the volume of poems he published in 1832. He wrote much after this, he was in his later years much in demand as an occasional poet and orator, but the poems that give him his place among the few American poets that may be called classics, were all written before journalism had laid its compelling hand upon him. His translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey in his last years is worthy of mention as a remarkable achievement of a man of his age, but the work is in no other way distinctive.