BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN American poet and journalist, was born at Cummington, a farming village in the Hampshire hills of western Mass., on Nov. 3, 1794. He was the second son of Peter Bryant, a physician and surgeon and a man of scholarship. Peter Bryant was the great-grandson of Stephen Bryant, an English Puritan emigrant to Massachusetts about 1632. The poet's mother, Sarah Snell, was a descendant of "Mayflower" pilgrims. Bryant's early education was limited. After the village school he received a year of exceptionally good training in Latin under his mother's brother, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Snell, of Brookfield, followed by a year of Greek under the Rev. Moses Hallock, of Plainfield, and at 16 en tered the sophomore class of Williams college. Here he was an apt and diligent student through two sessions, and then, be cause of the straitness of his father's means, he withdrew without graduating and studied classics and mathematics for a year in the vain hope that his father might yet be able to send him to Yale college. But the length of his school and college days would be a misleading measure of his training. He possessed many traits which often are established only by books and institutional regi men, as well as an impulse toward scholarship and citizenship. It is his own word that, two months after beginning with the Greek alphabet, he had read the entire New Testament. On abandoning his hope of entering Yale, he studied law under private guidance at Worthington and at Bridgewater. At 21 he was admitted to the bar, opened an office in Plainfield, presently withdrew from there, and at Great Barrington settled for nine years in the attorney's calling, for which he had an aversion that he never lost. His first book of verse, The Embargo, or Sketches of the Times; A Satire by a Youth of Thirteen, had been printed at Boston in 1808.
At the age of 26 Bryant married, at Great Barrington, Miss Frances Fairchild, with whom he enjoyed a happy union until her death nearly half a century later. In 1825 he removed to New York city to assume a literary editorship. Here for some months his fortunes were precarious, until in the next year he became one of the editors of the Evening Post. In 1829, he came into undivided editorial control, and became also chief owner. He died in 1878, in the month of his choice, as indicated in his poem "June." Bryant was a man of retiring and contemplative nature, and in his journalistic capacity and in daily debate was a counsellor rather than a leader. He stood for principles more than for measures.
His renown as a poet antedated the appearance of his first volume by about four or five years. "American poetry," says Richard Henry Stoddard, "may be said to have commenced in 1817 with . . . (Bryant's) `Thanatopsis' and `Inscription for the entrance of a wood.' " He wrote "Thanatopsis" at Cummington in his 18th year, and it was printed in 1817 in the North American Review; the "Inscription" was written in his 19th, and in his 21st while at Bridgewater, he composed "To a Water-fowl." His gift for language made him a frequent translator, and among his works of this sort his rendering of Homer is the most valuable. His poems, characterized by the equal purity of their artistic and their moral beauty, are, on the ethical side, more than pure ; they are—it may be said without derogation—Puritan. He never commerced with unloveliness for any loveliness that may be plucked out of it, and rarely discovered moral beauty under any sort of mask. Free from effeminacy and indelicacy, Bryant possessed a self-restraint that never permitted emotional transports in his works, which contain scarcely a distempered utterance or a passionate exaggeration. Even when he essayed to speak for spirits unlike his own he never portrayed any over mastering passion. The nearest he ever came to mirth was in "Robert of Lincoln," and the nearest to sorrow in writing of his young sister, "The Death of the Flowers." Bryant published volumes of Poems in 1821 (Cambridge) and 1832 (New York), and many other collections were issued under his super vision, the last being the Poetical Works (1876) . Among his volumes of verse were The Fountain and other poems (1842) ; The White Footed Deer and Other Poems (1844) ; Thirty Poems (1864) ; and blank verse translations of The Iliad of Homer (Boston, 187o) and of The Odyssey of Homer (Boston, 1871). His Poetical Works and his Complete Prose Writings (1883 and 1884) were edited by Parke Godwin, who also wrote A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from his private Correspondence (1883) . See also J. Grant Wilson, Bryant and his Friends (1886) ; John Bigelow, William Cullen Bryant (Boston, 189o), in the "American Men of Letters" series; W. A. Bradley, Bryant, in the "English Men of Letters" series (19o5) ; E. C. Stedman, Poets of America (1885) ; and biographical and bibliograph ical introductions by Henry C. Sturges and Richard Henry Stoddard to the "Roslyn edition" of his Poetical Works (19°3). For more recent critical estimates, see Norman Foerster, "Nature in Bryant's Poetry," So. Atlantic Quart., vol. xvii., pp. 10-17 (Durham, N. C., 1918) ; F. L. Pattee, Side Lights on American Literature (1922) ; W. L. Phelps, Howells, James, Bryant and Other Essays (1924) ; and E. W. Gage, "William Cullen Bryant," Jour. of Am. Hist., vol. xix., pp. 279-286 (Greenfield, Ind., 1925) .