From "The Death of the Flowers"
....
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade, and glen,
And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home ;
..... the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still....
Perhaps his most famous poem is "Thanatopsis", which contains these lines
....
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny.
....
Perhaps his most famous poem is "Thanatopsis", which contains these lines
....
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny.
....
That stern stuff is from his younger years. He was not only counted one of America's greatest poets, America was often his subject. His New York Evening Post was staunchly anti-slavery. Here is part of his "The African Chief."
Chained in the market-place he stood,
.....
All stern of look and strong of limb,
......And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound.
Vainly, but well, that chief had fought,
....
He was a captive now,
Yet pride, that fortune humbles not,
Was written on his brow.
The scars his dark broad bosom wore
Showed warrior true and brave;
Chained in the market-place he stood,
.....
All stern of look and strong of limb,
......And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound.
Vainly, but well, that chief had fought,
....
He was a captive now,
Yet pride, that fortune humbles not,
Was written on his brow.
The scars his dark broad bosom wore
Showed warrior true and brave;
...
He could not be a slave.
......
"For thou shalt be the Christian's slave,
In lands beyond the sea."
.....
Strong was the agony that shook
The captive's frame to hear,
And the proud meaning of his look
Was changed to mortal fear.
His heart was broken — crazed his brain:
At once his eye grew wild;
He struggled fiercely with his chain,
Whispered, and wept, and smiled;
Yet wore not long those fatal bands,
And once, at shut of day,
They ...[threw] him forth upon the sands,
The foul hyena's prey.
Bryant's position in 19th century American literature is summarized this way:
......
"For thou shalt be the Christian's slave,
In lands beyond the sea."
.....
Strong was the agony that shook
The captive's frame to hear,
And the proud meaning of his look
Was changed to mortal fear.
His heart was broken — crazed his brain:
At once his eye grew wild;
He struggled fiercely with his chain,
Whispered, and wept, and smiled;
Yet wore not long those fatal bands,
And once, at shut of day,
They ...[threw] him forth upon the sands,
The foul hyena's prey.
Bryant's position in 19th century American literature is summarized this way:
The fame he won as a poet while in his youth remained with him as he entered his eighties; only Longfellow and Emerson were his rivals in popularity over the course of his life. “Thanatopsis,” if not the best-known American poem abroad before the mid nineteenth century, certainly ranked near the top of the list, and at home school children were commonly required to recite it from memory.
The author of these words, Frank Gado is the source of our information on Bryant's career.
Only thirty-one when he presented his lectures, Bryant seemed the best candidate to realize the future he described, but a job he believed temporary and supplementary when he began it in July ordained a different course. 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,...[suffered an] injury ... in mid June of 1826, following a previous stroke that had cost him the use of his legs, [and this] forced him to rely on a substitute to help run the paper.
In October, despite Bryant’s commitment to lead The United States Review, he accepted a permanent position at the Evening Post, ...[and soon] he assumed the title appropriate to the responsibilities he had been bearing: editor-in-chief.
When Bryant appraised his prospects after leaving Williams College in 1811, his passion for writing poetry appeared to be utterly without promise of a remunerative career. 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. But in 1836, when the Harper brothers took Bryant into their publishing house, he was a most valuable asset. Numerous reprintings of his books spread his popularity still further, and the firm’s generous royalty made him the richest poet in American history.
.....
National economic woes further hurt revenues, and the Evening Post did not regain its financial footing until 1839. But from that point on, it prospered, steadily increasing the value of his sixty per cent ownership, and its reputation grew as Bryant etched the faults of his political opponents with his acid editorials. What had supposedly begun in 1827 as a means of keeping his belly full now fed a modest fortune that, with shrewd investments, would eventually amount to an estate of almost a million dollars.
Financial stability made more active pursuit of his diverse interests possible. A lifelong homoeopath–he had been taught herbal medicine by his father–he published Popular Considerations on Homeopathia and agreed to head the New York Homeopathic Society at the conclusion of 1841. During these same months, he joined the governing committee of the Apollo Association (soon renamed the American Art Union); two years later, and twice thereafter, the organization tapped him to be its chief. 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.
Public service was not permitted to exclude all other interests, however. The newspaper’s demands on Bryant’s attention and energy during the ’thirties had left none of either for poetry, but once the Evening Post was again profitable, he resumed writing verse.
For the most part, the decades after he took a step back from the burdensome tasks of running the Evening Post were ceded not to poetry but to travel and the offices of a cultural elder.
His last decades were spent with literary liondom types of activities:
The following quotes some passages from Gado's William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice. Our interest is a few details about the literary scene in mid century New York City, a topic not often visited. The following is skimpy on biography and may mention unfamiliar names, but it evokes a spirit both familiar and enticingly foreign-- young creative people settling into literary lives long ago. We begin in the 1820s, in rural New York, where Bryant practised law:
...
[I]n December 1823, came a bolt from the blue: Theophilus Parsons, the founding editor of The United States Literary Gazette, asked that ...[Bryant] contribute “ten or twenty pieces of poetry,” thereby joining “most of the best writers in Boston” in the new venture. When Parsons.... offered two hundred dollars per year for a monthly average submission of one verse, Bryant happily accepted. Well above the usual rate, the sum equaled approximately forty per cent of his annual law earnings.
......
Although Bryant was not consistently at his best, he had produced more poetry of high quality than any of his countrymen, yet he was still committed to a legal career. Then, in September 1824, an appellate court reversed a judgment he had won for his client; outraged that “a piece of pure chicane” should triumph over the merits of the case, he decided to quit the law. But this absurdity only precipitated a decision toward which he had been moving inexorably. Writing poetry at a steady pace for the Literary Gazette proved to him that he had not been disenthralled [during his labors as a lawyer] of the “dear witchery of song....”
Friendship with the Sedgwick family of nearby Stockbridge increased that disaffection. Through Charles Sedgwick, a fellow attorney whom he had known at Williams, Bryant had met the other three brothers and their sister Catharine–all intellectuals devoted to literature.
“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.” ....
A visit to Robert Sedgwick in New York ... waked thoughts of departing from the Berkshires. Hobnobbing with the city’s brightest literary lights, including James Fenimore Cooper, intrigued Bryant, and in February, he again visited the Sedgwick brothers.
A visit to Robert Sedgwick in New York ... waked thoughts of departing from the Berkshires. Hobnobbing with the city’s brightest literary lights, including James Fenimore Cooper, intrigued Bryant, and in February, he again visited the Sedgwick brothers.
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. Bryant felt liberated. 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. He kissed the children, talked much and smiled at every thing. He said more about your kindness to him than I have ever heard him express before, in regard to any body.” Leaving his family in the Berkshires on May Day, the newly appointed editor hurried to New York to push the first number of his publication toward press.
Though unconvinced that he was suited to “sitting in judgment on books,” Bryant applied himself to the task most creditably; however, the second part–i.e., the “magazine,” with its store of original works– presented more of a problem. 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 .... But little of comparable appeal was submitted for later numbers, and Bryant found it necessary to draw down his meager file of poems and then to try his hand at writing a tale, “A Pennsylvania Legend,” in order to fill the magazine. Subscriptions, meanwhile, fell short of the publisher’s hopes, and exactly a year after its launch, publication was suspended. But Bryant refused to accept defeat. For several anxious months, he had been making plans with a Boston editor to create an extension of the Literary Gazette, to be called The United States Review, and to merge it with a vestigial New-York Review. Ambitiously intended as a national publication, to be issued simultaneously in Boston and New York, it lost its first co-editor 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.
Though unconvinced that he was suited to “sitting in judgment on books,” Bryant applied himself to the task most creditably; however, the second part–i.e., the “magazine,” with its store of original works– presented more of a problem. 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 .... But little of comparable appeal was submitted for later numbers, and Bryant found it necessary to draw down his meager file of poems and then to try his hand at writing a tale, “A Pennsylvania Legend,” in order to fill the magazine. Subscriptions, meanwhile, fell short of the publisher’s hopes, and exactly a year after its launch, publication was suspended. But Bryant refused to accept defeat. For several anxious months, he had been making plans with a Boston editor to create an extension of the Literary Gazette, to be called The United States Review, and to merge it with a vestigial New-York Review. Ambitiously intended as a national publication, to be issued simultaneously in Boston and New York, it lost its first co-editor 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.
...
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 year’s salary, one might have expected regret over his choice. Instead, in spite of an onerous workload, it was proving a heady adventure. ....
Upon his arrival, [in New York] he boarded with a French family so that he might polish the language he had first studied with his father. M. Evrard insisted that he attend mass for his soul’s salvation and tried to convert him to Catholicism, yet Bryant, respecting the man’s ebullient nature and good heart, took it all in good stride, and when Fanny [his wife] and their daughter moved to the city, they joined the crowded Evrard household for about a month. The renewal of his French had nearly immediate application: for the July issue of The New-York Review, Bryant not only wrote a long essay reviewing a new edition of Jehan de Nostre Dame’s 1575 work on the troubadour poets but also translated Provençal poetry to accompany the critical evaluation. He did not stop there. Acquaintance with the famed Cuban poet José Maria Hérédia led him to learn Spanish and study Spanish literature, as well as to translate Hérédia’s poems into English. Close ties with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s great librettist who had moved to New York from London and had made promotion of Italian opera his mission, introduced Bryant to this art during his first year in the city, while the busy editor studied Italian. Da Ponte published several works in Bryant’s journal, including observations on Dante, and he subsequently translated some of Bryant’s poetry into his native tongue.
The cream of New York’s creative artists eagerly welcomed the newcomer into their circle. James Fenimore Cooper invited him to join his Bread and Cheese Lunch Club, beginning an intimate relationship that would last until Cooper’s death at mid-century. (Installed to membership at the same time were another poet, James Hillhouse, and Samuel Morse, a painter who would later gain greater fame as an inventor). “The Lunch,” as it was known, became the hub of Bryant’s social life. He had discovered in early adolescence a strong attraction to sketching; now, in the presence of artists determined to create a new age of American painting, that interest revived. In Thomas Cole, whom he had also first encountered through the Sedgwicks, he found a kindred spirit, and he made common cause with the other artists at The Lunch: Asher Durand, Henry Inman, John Wesley Jarvis, and John Vanderlyn.
In 1827, the National Academy of the Arts of Design, newly formed by the group, elected Bryant its “Professor of Mythology and Antiquities.” His literary friends at The Lunch and “the Den,” a meeting room in Charles Wiley’s bookstore where Cooper held forth, were equally prominent.
Besides Hillhouse and Cooper, they included the brilliant conversationalist Robert Sands, whose long poem Yamoyden (1820) had begun the vogue for Indian subjects; the darling poet of the moment, Fitz-Greene Halleck; the estimable Knickerbocker and Congressman Gulian Verplanck; and James Kirke Paulding, who had recently published the satirical novel Koningsmarke (1823)and was the foremost advocate of a national literature. In addition, Bryant had come to know William Dunlap, both a painter and an eminent figure in New York theater. ....
As both an American poet respected by Europe and an editor at the center of New York City’s cultural renaissance, Bryant found himself called upon to play the role of prophet.
As both an American poet respected by Europe and an editor at the center of New York City’s cultural renaissance, Bryant found himself called upon to play the role of prophet.
Immediately prior to his move to the city, the North American Review had published his article about Catharine Sedgwick’s Redwood. Initially intended to promote his good friend’s novel, the essay developed into a rallying cry for an indigenous American literature–a cause perfectly suited to New York’s expansive mood. The following spring, the man who had once worried about speaking in public was delivering four lectures on poetry at the New York Atheneum. Carefully reasoned and balanced, these pronouncements warrant comparison with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” of a decade later as a charter for national literary achievement.
Only thirty-one when he presented his lectures, Bryant seemed the best candidate to realize the future he described, but a job he believed temporary and supplementary when he began it in July ordained a different course. 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,...[suffered an] injury ... in mid June of 1826, following a previous stroke that had cost him the use of his legs, [and this] forced him to rely on a substitute to help run the paper.
Bryant was an obvious choice. Worried about the possibility of financial ruin, he had just obtained a licence to practice law in New York as insurance against calamity, but journalism posed a happier alternative..... Bryant had also been veering toward Democratic positions ... and he admired Andrew Jackson and felt personally drawn to his good friend Paulding’s good friend Martin Van Buren....
In October, despite Bryant’s commitment to lead The United States Review, he accepted a permanent position at the Evening Post, ...[and soon] he assumed the title appropriate to the responsibilities he had been bearing: editor-in-chief.
When [Richard Henry] Dana, his artistic conscience, warned that journalistic meddling in politics would stifle his poetry, Bryant famously answered that the paper would “get only my mornings, and you know politics and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation.” But Bryant’s reply may have been somewhat disingenuous. The financial prospect with the Evening Post was alluring: Bryant bought a share of the paper and later added to his portion of ownership, confident it would make his fortune–as indeed it eventually did.
More important, for all his protestations about having to “drudge for the Evening Post,” politics fascinated him. In addition to liberal economic policies that included free trade, support for labor to organize, opposition to monopolies, pro-immigrant policies, and low interest rates, he consistently stood for resistance to the spread of slavery.
.....
To see Bryant in the 1820's as having to choose between poetry on the one hand and journalistic politics on the other, however, is to imply too stark a divide. The New York of that time rather resembled the cities of Europe in its evolution of a cultural coterie, and Bryant had rapidly become one of its most prestigious members. Just as the literati associated with the North American Review had, however briefly, helped make Boston the nation’s intellectual center, Bryant, as much as any other single figure, shifted that focus to New York. Poetic accomplishment accounted for a part of his influence, and his authority as editor surely weighed as much, but equally important was the conviviality which drew the city’s writers and artists to him. Once diffident in nature, he had developed a knack for acting as a catalyst. Typically manifesting this quality were the three annuals and a collection of tales, all generated as exercises in camaraderie.
At the end of 1827, ....Bryant, in company with Robert Sands and Gulian Verplanck, promoted the idea of a Christmas gift book similar to English annuals ... Unlike its models, which were miscellanies by various authors, The Talisman would be entirely attributed to a single writer, Francis Herbert–in fact, a pseudonym for the three friends, each of whom assumed responsibility for about a third of the annual’s pages while also participating in the work of the others. Two of Bryant’s three tales for the initial Talisman seem to have been suggested by his collaborators. Recounting a purported Indian legend supplied by Verplanck, “The Cascade of Melsingah” resembles countless other specimens of the genre and is the weakest of the three. “The Legend of the Devil’s Pulpit,” probably suggested by Sands, has a rather flawed plot, but there is a sprightliness to the lampooning of local figures that appealed to readers.
At the end of 1827, ....Bryant, in company with Robert Sands and Gulian Verplanck, promoted the idea of a Christmas gift book similar to English annuals ... Unlike its models, which were miscellanies by various authors, The Talisman would be entirely attributed to a single writer, Francis Herbert–in fact, a pseudonym for the three friends, each of whom assumed responsibility for about a third of the annual’s pages while also participating in the work of the others. Two of Bryant’s three tales for the initial Talisman seem to have been suggested by his collaborators. Recounting a purported Indian legend supplied by Verplanck, “The Cascade of Melsingah” resembles countless other specimens of the genre and is the weakest of the three. “The Legend of the Devil’s Pulpit,” probably suggested by Sands, has a rather flawed plot, but there is a sprightliness to the lampooning of local figures that appealed to readers.
The best of the lot, “Adventure in the East Indies,” a completely fabricated description of a tiger hunt, issued solely from Bryant’s imagination; though a weak story, it is almost redeemed through creative invention of detail and evocative prose.
Despite the haste of its composition, The Talisman for 1828 was well received, and the collaborators, who now formed the nucleus of the Sketch Club (also known as Twenty-One, for the number of members), developed a successor for 1829–this volume to accommodate other club members and to feature art work. Bryant contributed five poems, a translation of a Spanish ballad, and a travel account of Spain (which, like the East Indies, he had not visited), in addition to one tale of terrible cruelty and vengeance, “Story of the Island of Cuba.” A final volume of the annual was compiled for 1830, even though duties elsewhere taxed all three collaborators. Again, Bryant’s share in “Francis Herbert” was both varied and weighty: in addition to half a dozen poems, he wrote three tales. By now The Talisman had run its course, but a different publisher, Harper and Brother, thought enough of Bryant’s collaborative approach to request another, similar collection in 1832 consisting exclusively of tales. Bryant was receptive. The birth of another daughter the previous June and the expense of moving to a new house in Hoboken, New Jersey, furnished sufficient reason to accept the Harpers’ bid, but he obviously also welcomed the opportunity to write more fiction, especially as it meant working in enjoyable company with friends. To Verplanck (who withdrew at the last moment) and Sands, he added his editorial associate on the Evening Post, William Leggett, along with novelists Catharine Sedgwick and James Kirke Paulding. Supposedly stories told by visitors to the waters at Ballston, New York, Tales of the Glauber-Spa includes two by Bryant: “The Skeleton’s Cave,” a long piece evidently influenced by Cooper, and “Medfield,” a moral tale, autobiographically based, about a good man guilty of one shameful act when he had lost his temper.
That Bryant never wrote another tale is conventionally attributed to lack of seriousness about the genre and to the poor quality of his efforts. But these explanations are misleading. To be sure, he was primarily a poet, and the first annual did have something of the character of a lark. Even so, his fiction deserves more respect than it has received. 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. “A Pennsylvania Legend,” about an avaricious humpback who finds a cache of gold, imports the effects of European Romantic tales into an American setting; “A Border Tradition,” a ghost story rationally explained, seeks to exploit America’s rich variety of ethnic enclaves–in this case, the Dutch in New York. Had he thought little of these efforts? No such judgment has been recorded, but if he had a low opinion of his talent for such writing, it seems unlikely that he would have embarked on The Talisman, given its major emphasis on fiction. Moreover, the contemporary response to his stories was encouraging: all three volumes of the annual were critically praised, largely because of their prose, and the complete run of Tales of the Glauber-Spa sold so quickly that it was reprinted. Bryant’s talent for fiction is nowhere more evident than in “The Indian Spring,” published in The Talisman for 1830. Indeed, excepting only one or two pieces by Washington Irving, no previous American short story is its equal.
The signal literary event of the decade for Bryant, however, was his publication of a new edition of Poems in January 1832. At 240 pages, it added all poems published in the previous decade (plus five that he had kept in his file), and although relatively few of these were at the level of the best from the 1821 Poems, the greater number broadened the base of his achievement. The response acknowledged Bryant as “his country’s foremost poet,”
Despite the haste of its composition, The Talisman for 1828 was well received, and the collaborators, who now formed the nucleus of the Sketch Club (also known as Twenty-One, for the number of members), developed a successor for 1829–this volume to accommodate other club members and to feature art work. Bryant contributed five poems, a translation of a Spanish ballad, and a travel account of Spain (which, like the East Indies, he had not visited), in addition to one tale of terrible cruelty and vengeance, “Story of the Island of Cuba.” A final volume of the annual was compiled for 1830, even though duties elsewhere taxed all three collaborators. Again, Bryant’s share in “Francis Herbert” was both varied and weighty: in addition to half a dozen poems, he wrote three tales. By now The Talisman had run its course, but a different publisher, Harper and Brother, thought enough of Bryant’s collaborative approach to request another, similar collection in 1832 consisting exclusively of tales. Bryant was receptive. The birth of another daughter the previous June and the expense of moving to a new house in Hoboken, New Jersey, furnished sufficient reason to accept the Harpers’ bid, but he obviously also welcomed the opportunity to write more fiction, especially as it meant working in enjoyable company with friends. To Verplanck (who withdrew at the last moment) and Sands, he added his editorial associate on the Evening Post, William Leggett, along with novelists Catharine Sedgwick and James Kirke Paulding. Supposedly stories told by visitors to the waters at Ballston, New York, Tales of the Glauber-Spa includes two by Bryant: “The Skeleton’s Cave,” a long piece evidently influenced by Cooper, and “Medfield,” a moral tale, autobiographically based, about a good man guilty of one shameful act when he had lost his temper.
That Bryant never wrote another tale is conventionally attributed to lack of seriousness about the genre and to the poor quality of his efforts. But these explanations are misleading. To be sure, he was primarily a poet, and the first annual did have something of the character of a lark. Even so, his fiction deserves more respect than it has received. 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. “A Pennsylvania Legend,” about an avaricious humpback who finds a cache of gold, imports the effects of European Romantic tales into an American setting; “A Border Tradition,” a ghost story rationally explained, seeks to exploit America’s rich variety of ethnic enclaves–in this case, the Dutch in New York. Had he thought little of these efforts? No such judgment has been recorded, but if he had a low opinion of his talent for such writing, it seems unlikely that he would have embarked on The Talisman, given its major emphasis on fiction. Moreover, the contemporary response to his stories was encouraging: all three volumes of the annual were critically praised, largely because of their prose, and the complete run of Tales of the Glauber-Spa sold so quickly that it was reprinted. Bryant’s talent for fiction is nowhere more evident than in “The Indian Spring,” published in The Talisman for 1830. Indeed, excepting only one or two pieces by Washington Irving, no previous American short story is its equal.
The signal literary event of the decade for Bryant, however, was his publication of a new edition of Poems in January 1832. At 240 pages, it added all poems published in the previous decade (plus five that he had kept in his file), and although relatively few of these were at the level of the best from the 1821 Poems, the greater number broadened the base of his achievement. The response acknowledged Bryant as “his country’s foremost poet,”
.....[A] British edition, shepherded to press by his friend Irving (who lent his name to the volume as editor, though not his services), was hailed as the work of the outstanding poet from the “primeval forest beyond the sea,” worthy of inclusion among the ranks of the principal English Romantics. Later that same year, Bryant left his desk at the Evening Post to travel, first to Washington, then, after swinging through the upper South, to Illinois. His experience of the nation’s great rivers, and then of the awesome sweep of prairie stirred him profoundly. The next year, he published his great blank verse poem “The Prairies,” which in 1834 became the most notable addition to yet another edition of Poems. Bryant’s trip bears comparison to Walt Whitman’s pivotal journey to Louisiana and the Midwest in 1848: for both men, the experience of an America spreading boundlessly beyond their lives in the East affected their sense of voice as American poets.
When Bryant appraised his prospects after leaving Williams College in 1811, his passion for writing poetry appeared to be utterly without promise of a remunerative career. 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. But in 1836, when the Harper brothers took Bryant into their publishing house, he was a most valuable asset. Numerous reprintings of his books spread his popularity still further, and the firm’s generous royalty made him the richest poet in American history.
.....
National economic woes further hurt revenues, and the Evening Post did not regain its financial footing until 1839. But from that point on, it prospered, steadily increasing the value of his sixty per cent ownership, and its reputation grew as Bryant etched the faults of his political opponents with his acid editorials. What had supposedly begun in 1827 as a means of keeping his belly full now fed a modest fortune that, with shrewd investments, would eventually amount to an estate of almost a million dollars.
Financial stability made more active pursuit of his diverse interests possible. A lifelong homoeopath–he had been taught herbal medicine by his father–he published Popular Considerations on Homeopathia and agreed to head the New York Homeopathic Society at the conclusion of 1841. During these same months, he joined the governing committee of the Apollo Association (soon renamed the American Art Union); two years later, and twice thereafter, the organization tapped him to be its chief. 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.
Public service was not permitted to exclude all other interests, however. The newspaper’s demands on Bryant’s attention and energy during the ’thirties had left none of either for poetry, but once the Evening Post was again profitable, he resumed writing verse.
In 1842 he published The Fountain and Other Poems, all written after his return from Europe. That same year, he also signed an exclusive contract to sell his poems to Graham’s Magazine at fifty dollars apiece–a record high price for poetry.
...
For the most part, the decades after he took a step back from the burdensome tasks of running the Evening Post were ceded not to poetry but to travel and the offices of a cultural elder.
......Bryant returned to Europe in 1845. 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....
.....
[He brought his family on a later tour. ] They were accompanied by their daughter Julia (who had learned Italian from her father) and one of Julia’s best friends. Again they traveled to major cities, this time including Madrid, but the focus of the trip was Italy. Ironically, the trip that had been partly planned for Mrs. Bryant’s health almost caused her death when she was stricken by a respiratory infection in Naples. For four months her husband cared for her himself with homeopathic treatment that he was convinced saved her life.
...[T]he Bryants visited the Hawthornes in Rome, where the now celebrated novelist was writing The Marble Faun, and then again in Florence, where they also spent time with Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
.....
He had instantly recognized Lincoln as a man of greatness when they met in 1859, and it was Bryant who introduced the Westerner to New Yorkers in the pivotal Cooper Union speech.
After the election, however, Bryant criticized Lincoln for not immediately emancipating all slaves, and then for not prosecuting the war vigorously enough. The dispute taxed the editor, as did the managerial problems inherent in the doubling of the newspaper’s circulation during the war years.....
His last decades were spent with literary liondom types of activities:
No one could challenge his place as First Citizen of New York. Among his causes over the decades, he had been the prime advocate for a unified and uniformed police department, agitated for the paving of the city streets, led the way for creation of Central Park, fought for establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a cardinal attribute of a great world city, and supported the right of labor to unionize. As a man of letters, too, though no longer consequential, he remained active. His last publisher, Appleton, aware that Bryant’s name now guaranteed a handsome sale, asked him to write the text for Picturesque America, a two-volume folio of engravings that cost over $100,000 to print–a gargantuan sum in those days. Bryant agreed, though he soon wearied of the task of furnishing “the most tedious of all reading.” The two parts were published in 1872 and 1874. A second massive project, A Popular History of the United States, was almost entirely entrusted to the pen of Sidney Howard Gay, who was then the managing editor of the Evening Post, but Bryant wrote the introduction laying out the history’s scheme, with distinctive emphases on pre-Columbian peoples and on the deleterious effects of the politics of race on the nation’s idealistic principles.
His biographer summarizes Bryant this way:
No line of his poetry survives in the consciousness of his nation, and none of his editorial pronouncements still resonates from his five decades with the New-York Evening Post, yet William Cullen Bryant stood among the most celebrated figures in the frieze of nineteenth-century America.
More information about William Cullen Bryant is available at the link above.
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