Unbinding "The Book": Bryant's "The Fountain" in the Democratic Review

William Cullen Bryant's status exemplifies the current neglect by American literary studies of its nineteenth-century poetry. In a field all but eclipsed by Whitman and Dickinson, Bryant is the reception historian's ironic counterexample: the preeminent poet of his day, the poet who always would be remembered even if he had written only "Thanatopsis," subsequently designated as a genteel writer and ignored. Even attention to Bryant's career as the decades-long, "fierce" political editor of the New York Evening Post has done little to resuscitate his reputation. The split appears too wide between the poet's meditations and the editor's political passions. ²

My reading of different publication forms of Bryant's poem "The Fountain" seeks to forge intersections in Bryant's seemingly split career and argues that the periodical versions of Bryant's poetry are key for a renewed understanding of his career. By comparing "The Fountain" in its first book appearance (1842) to its original periodical publication (1839), I argue that the book as a form ultimately renders Bryant's poem politically impotent, while the periodical publication reveals a text actively engaged in the political debates of its day. To read Bryant's seemingly apolitical poem otherwise requires that we adjust our understanding of the poem's vehicle of dissemination in addition to collating Bryant's political and poetical careers. Recognizing periodicals as a key vehicle for nineteenth-century American poetry makes clear how the removal of Bryant's poetry from a periodical context has damaged its position in the American canon.

Recovering Bryant's periodical publication of "The Fountain" as a political poem is an act that seeks to infuse interest in the career of a writer whose current status as a genteel poet elides his past position as a highly visible citizen involved in the social and political events of his time. ³ It is also an act that responds to the larger neglect suffered by nineteenth-century American poetry. As Joseph Harrington argues in "Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature" (1996), the study of American literature has come to mean the study of American fiction. Harrington, like critic Alan Golding, argues that scholars treat fiction as having "privileged access to history" and reject the idea that poetry does "cultural work." ⁴ In effect, claims Harrington, recent criticism becomes complicit with New Criticism: by ignoring poetry, it upholds the New Critical notions that poetry should be ahistorical, unpopular, and an aesthetic repository. ⁵ Recent scholarship by Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Anna Brickhouse highlights Bryant as "Hispanophile" and locates him in a larger narrative of a multilingual, transnational literary tradition. ⁶ Such work also enacts the type of "cultural" work that largely has been absent from poetry studies. As Timothy Morris notes in his analysis of Bryant's literary status, even if literary scholarship does not find reason to call for such an author's revival, "[it] should be able to reproduce a living sense of why these authors had to be reckoned with." ⁷

A familiarity with Bryant's life reveals many reasons why he was a citizen "to be reckoned with." A key participant in a variety of cultural activities, he actively supported American visual artists and performed his poetry at the dedication of various statues in New York City's Central Park—a park he reputedly had "authored," too. ⁸ Nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics most often have invoked Bryant's political involvement, however, to illustrate the poet's prominence during his time. As the decades-long editor of the New York Evening Post, Bryant argued for the rights of laborers, fought for a more stringent copyright law, and supported freedom of speech. ⁹ For many years, Bryant held this position as a prominent member of the Democratic party and so wrote on key party issues, speaking out especially...