Early American Poetry: Selections from Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Freneau, and Bryant

FIVE William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

FIVE William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) THE LAST of our five early American poets, William Cullen Bryant, is often paradoxically remembered as his country's first major poet, not because he came earliest chronologically or was the first to write memorable verses but because he initiated that romantic tradition of nineteenth-century writing which has dominated popular and scholarly perceptions of this country's literature. For generations of students, Bryant's portrait on the schoolroom wall-surrounded by Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow-both established his importance and limited the cultural context in which he would be considered. Yet his poetry relates to the Puritan and neoclassical traditions from which it emerged as well as to the romantic patterns it introduced. Reading Bryant in the context of earlier poetry, one gains insights which might be obscured by identifying him only with the artistic achievements of the American Renaissance. Renaissance, after all, means rebirth; the beginning, or genesis, of this nation's poetry came almost two centuries earlier, with Anne Bradstreet. The latently Puritan aspects of his New England tradition reached Bryant through the atmosphere of Cummington, Massachusetts , where he was born in 1794 and spent his boyhood. A small farming town in the mountains west of the Connecticut River, Cummington maintained the conservative Congregational and Federalist principles of its settlers. Bryant grew up on a family farm belonging to his maternal grandfather, Deacon Ebenezer Snell (sentimentally remembered in "The Old Man's Counsel" [1840]) and received steady moral and religious instruction from 254 Introduction 255 his grandparents and his mother. He attended the Congregational church, participated in family prayer, and wrote his first childish verses on biblical subjects. Although he never formally subscribed to orthodox Calvinist doctrine, he gained from this early experience a habit of moral earnestness, a concern for spiritual values, and a love for the sonorous, rhythmic, elevated language which he found even in the informal family prayer of Bible-reading farmers. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant, introduced young Cullen to more liberal Unitarian religious views while reinforcing the Federalist political attitudes which dominated Cummington. A country doctor with a busy if not lucrative practice, Peter Bryant felt literary ambitions; he kept in touch with cultural leaders in Boston and occasionally submitted verses to literary journals. When his second son showed precocious poetic talent, then, Dr. Bryant was ready to encourage ambition, correct careless thought or expression, provide models from his extensive library of classical and English poetry, and assist publication. He trained the young poet in the rational conventions of neoclassical writing and guided him in translation of classical poetry, especially the Aeneid. With his father's help, Bryant published his first poem in the local newspaper in 1807 and a satiric verse pamphlet, The Embargo , the next year. An anti-Jeffersonian satire attacking the shipping embargo as a menace to New England commerce and agriculture, the verses recall Freneau's political writing in manner though not in party allegiance. An excerpt may demonstrate both the neoclassical conventions and the conservative opinions with which Bryant began his career: As Johnson deep, as Addison refin'd, And skill'd to pour conviction o'er the mind, Oh might some Patriot rise! the gloom dispel, Chase error's mist, and break her magic spell! But vain the wish, for hark! the murmuring meed Of hoarse applause, from yonder shed proceed; Enter, and view the thronging concourse there, Intent, with gaping mouth, and stupid stare, While in the midst their supple leader stands, 256 William Cullen Bryant Harangues aloud, and flourishes his hands; To adulation tunes his servile throat, And sues, successful, for each blockhead's vote.1 The Embargo won considerable local celebrity for its fourteenyear -old author and encouraged his ambition for literary achievement . Bryant's formal education was limited, consisting of preparatory studies with neighboring clergymen and less than a year at Williams College. Family financial pressures prevented him from transferring to Yale and forced him to read law instead, in preparation for the legal practice he opened in 1815 and effectively concluded in 1825. He practiced law in Great Barrington, Massachusetts , but continued to write poetry, publishing whatever he could. His reputation grew dramatically in 1817, when the North American Review published an early version of "Thanatopsis ," which his father copied from the manuscript he found in his desk and carried to Boston to submit to the editors. That such a poem...