William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
Poetry is a lonely occupation, but not a solitary one. Poets of any consequence rarely write in isolation from the influence of their predecessors or from the influence of other poets of their own time. When William Cullen Bryant was still an adolescent, he read a book of poems that would change his life: Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798 by his great English contemporaries William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This volume of poetry and theory focused the expression and much of the philosophy of the Romantic era. The book was a powerful source of inspiration for poets who wanted to replace conventional poetic diction with the common speech of their own time. Bryant was one these poets – the first mature American Romantic, the country boy who translated the messages of English Romanticism into his native tongue.
Two other important factors supported the influence of English Romanticism on Bryant’s poetry. One factor was Bryant’s own growing attraction to the philosophy of deism, which held that divinity could be found in nature. The other factor was the geography of his surroundings, which placed Bryant in immediate contact with everything that supported this philosophy.
By the time of Bryant’s birth, western Massachusetts was no longer a colonial frontier but a widely settled countryside. Over the next hundred years and more, its farms, steepled towns, and mountain forests would be the homes of many poets. These writers would find in their surroundings metaphors to express their sense of correspondence between human life and the life of nature. After Bryant, the same New England seasons would turn for Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson and later for Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur. All these poets were intimate with the shadows and whispers of the Berkshires and the adjacent Green Mountains. All would make their own small plot of ground part of the permanent landscape of American poetry.
Bryant was born in Cummington, Massachusetts. His father was a physician, and his mother came from a family of clergy. Bryant’s literary gifts were evident from an early age. By the age of nine, he was already writing poetry and had earned a reputation as a prodigy.
Bryant was tutored for a career as a lawyer, but with the publication of “Thanatopsis,” his most celebrated poem, his literary future was assured. In his late twenties he moved to New York City and for many years played the triple role of editor, critic and poet.
Bryant became not only a famous literary figure but also an influential voice in religion and politics. An outspoken liberal, Bryant supported social reform, free speech, and the growing movement for the abolition of slavery. He was also one of the founders of the Republican Party, which, in his lifetime, would produce Abraham Lincoln. When Bryant died, at the age of 83, he was a millionaire and so widely honored at home and abroad that he became a kind of national monument, the widely acknowledged father of American poetry.