BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN (1794-1878). In 1811 a 17-year-old boy of Cummington, Mass., was musing one day about the great facts of life and death. His musings naturally fell into metrical form, for he had been writing verses before he donned long trousers.
Later his father, a country doctor, sent the poem to the editor of the North American Review. It was published in 1817 and won instant fame for the writer.
The poem was Thanatopsis,' the first great poem written by an American, and the writer was William Cullen Bryant, "father of American poets." At the age of 10 this young prodigy had published a poem in a country newspaper and at 14 he prepared a collec tion of poems which was put out in book form and soon ran into a second edition. This was The Embargo', a political satire criticizing the policy of President Jefferson, which attracted wide notice.
The publication of Thanatopsis' marked an epoch in American letters. In the early days of the Republic its readers were slavish imitators of English patterns. Thanatopsis' was the first genuinely American poem, based on independent and original thinking and inspired by our own American landscape.
Bryant had, of course, read the English poets and had admired some of them intensely. Those to whom he felt most akin were Cowper, Coleridge, and Words worth, because they too loved nature. And yet he could read their poems without copying their ideas and forms. He wrote Thanatopsis' in a noble, rolling rhythm all his own, and he took Nature as he found her—austere with a dignity that made even death sufficiently beautiful and inevitable to make him scorn the man who feared it.
It is Bryant's poetry that raises his head above the crowd, and yet original verse occupied a very small part of his days. He studied law as a boy, but did not practice it long. For fifty years and more he edited the New York Evening Post. America, as E. C. Stedman says, " called for workers, journalists, practical teachers. If after accomplishing their daily tasks they found time to sing a song, it thanked them and did little more." When it is remembered that Bryant wrote several books of travel, and made many public speeches, translated Homer's Odyssey' and Iliad' into blank verse, and edited an extensive American history in addition to his newspaper work, it is not astonishing to find that his original verse filled only a few thin volumes.
Among Bryant's most famous poems are `Thanatopsis', 'To a Waterfowl', 'A Winter Piece', 'The Death of the Flowers', 'Song of Marion's Men'.