William Cullen Bryant Biography

Dromo's Den

BRYANT, William Cullen (1794-1878). A distinguished American poet and journalist. He was born in Cummington, Mass., Nov. 3, 1794, the son of Dr. Peter Bryant, a physician and a member, for several terms, of the Massachusetts Legislature. He showed his precocity as a poet by publishing verse, at the age of 13, in the New Hampshire Gazette, and by writing the following year a satirical poem, "The Embargo", in the eighteenth-century manner; his most famous poem, "Thanatopsis", was probably composed in 1811, though it was not published till 1817. Bryant studied for a year at Williams College, then took up law. He was admitted to the bar in Plymouth, Mass., in 1815, practiced in Plainfield, Mass., for a year, and in Great Barrington for nine years. During this time he was so well known as a poet that he was invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard College in 1821, and his poem on that occasion, "The Ages", was published with several others in the same year. In 1825 Bryant removed to New York, where he became editor of the New York Review. In the following year he became assistant editor of the New York Evening Post and in 1828 was made editor in chief of that paper a post which he held till his death. During this time he wrote and published many poems and several works in prose, besides his regular newspaper articles. Aside from his poems, which were published occasionally in various newspapers and magazines, Bryant's chief published works are the following: Letters of a Traveler (1850); Letters from Spain and Other Countries (1859); Letters from the East (1869); Orations and Addresses (1873); and several volumes of collected poems. During the period of his active literary work he found time to translate the epics of Homer, his well-known version of the Iliad appearing in 1870, and that of the Odyssey in 1871-72. His death occurred in New York, June 12, 1878, as the result of a sunstroke, while he was making an address at the unveiling of a statue in Central Park.

The literary and journalistic career of Bryant comprises nearly two-thirds of a century. Noted, as a boy, for his precocity, and as a man, living for fifty years in the largest city in America, for the simplicity and wholesomeness of his life and for his distinction of mind and bearing, his career is one of the longest in the history of American letters. He is best known as a poet. His "Thanatopsis", "To a Waterfowl", "The Death of the Flowers", "The Fringed Gentian", "The Crowded Street", "My Country's Call", "The Battlefield", and several other poems are popular, and such lines as "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again" (from "The Battlefield"), and "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year" (from "The Death of the Flowers"), have become household quotations. The poems named were produced at widely different periods during his life, but they may be taken as representative of the quality of his work, which during his long life changed very little. Generally speaking, the poetry of Bryant is distinguished for its restrained and grave thoughtfulness. Though in finish of form, restraint, lack of fire, reflectiveness, and sentiment, it belongs to the type of the eighteenth century rather than to the period of passionate expression which in England was contemporaneous with it, Bryant's poetry, nevertheless, is not wanting in originality. Besides its frequent tenderness and sympathy with sadness, one notes in it a feeling of refined patriotism, a constant love of liberty, and a zeal for the institutions of freedom. So, too, one finds in his poetry admiration for whatever is noble and generous in the life of the North American Indian and other primitive peoples, though his feeling for the red man is probably based on a vaguer and even more remote tradition than that of his contemporary, Cooper. In all the poems, however, the constant note is moralizing, void of subtlety. Most of the poems of Bryant are short, and the verse forms are not very numerous; the one in which he attained greatest skill is a simple blank verse, as in "Thanatopsis". This verse is employed in his translations of the Iliad.

As a journalist, Bryant is less known today than such an editor as Horace Greeley. For a full half century he was, as proprietor and editor of the New York Evening Post, one of the most insistent and uncompromisingly urgent of all the antislavery propagandists of the North. The prose style of his editorial articles was simple, straightforward, and vigorous, lacking in subtlety and ambiguity, and never failing to make its point, and is marked, in substance, by common sense and breadth of view. Like all ephemeral writing, Bryant's leading articles are unread; and the same remark, in general, applies to his more elaborate prose productions, especially his literary essays, of which that on Irving is the best.

It should be added that Bryant deserves some praise as a poetic delineator of American scenery. It is worth noting, also, that between 1828 and 1845, when the cares of journalism pressed heavily upon him, his poetic productivity suffered. After the latter date, almost to his death he showed a rather surprising affluence and power, publishing many of his best poems, such as "The Flood of Years." Readers should be cautioned against believing that "Thanatopsis" is entirely the product of a mere youth, since the famous passage about the quarry slave was apparently added several years after Bryant reached his majority.

The New International Encyclopaedia Vol IV. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 46-47.