The Complete Stories of William Cullen Bryant

Introduction: From Poet to Story Writer

Introduction: From Poet to Story Writer Stories, of varying lengths and varieties of modes, have surely existed almost as long as the rudiments of language itself, but the short story in its modern guise, however wide the latitude of its definition, only made its appearance at the end of the nineteenth century’s second decade. In 1820, Sydney Smith famously scoffed in the Edinburgh Review, “Who in the four corners of the globe reads an American book?” Almost simultaneously, Washington Irving was contradicting the denigration with The Sketch Book, which not only quickly won admiration in his native land and Great Britain but also found favor throughout Europe. The publication of two of the stories it contained, “Rip Van Winkle” (written the year before) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” ranks amongthemoreconsequentialeventsofAmericanfiction’sfirstcentury. No American novel that preceded it had enjoyed greater recognition, nor could any of the short narratives padding our early magazines claim anything approaching Irving’s degree of stylistic elegance. Curiously, although our literary historians customarily delight in noting the irony in Smith’s belittlement of America’s prospects, they become inexplicably timid in crediting the short story’s major role in establishing an emergent national literature. The campaign for literary nationalism had been waged with increasing intensity since independence. Did political separation also require expression of a discrete cultural identity, and if it did, what might it look like? Irving both helped to confirm the possibility of a distinctive, self-consciously American literature and offered a possible model for its development. Past mention of Irving’s breakthrough, attention invariably skips to Poe and Hawthorne, whose works do not start attracting readers until past the middle 1830s. The neglect of the dozen intervening years is unfortunate. While James Fenimore Cooper was whetting international appetites for sea novels and mythic frontier romances, a small group of short story writers was testing the parameters of their asyet -unbaptised new genre as a means of asserting Americanness. None of these ignored pioneers rewards study more than a frustrated young from poet to story writer 2 poet who fled a deadening law practice in western Massachusetts for a literary career in New York City. William Cullen Bryant had been impelled toward poetry soon after his birth in Cummington, a hamlet in the Berkshires, in 1794. Given a physician father who wrote poems, prided himself on an unerringly acute sense in language, revered Alexander Pope, and compiled an extensive library of verse in English – including a large selection of what his young nation had produced – the son was locked to his destiny. At nine, the precocious child composed and recited fifty-four lines in heroic couplets for his school’s end-of-year ceremony; published three years later in the Hampshire Gazette, the poem became a favorite for declamation at similar occasions in the region. Greater celebrity came with The Embargo, written at thirteen, in which he hurled satiric heroic couplets of scorn on Thomas Jefferson and his administration. New England, gravely suffering the economic consequences of the recently passed Embargo Act of 1807, cheered the attack from the pen of “a mere lad” and bought the edition with such alacrity that a second edition was rushed into print, supplemented with additional poems. Shortly thereafter, his decision to prepare for entrance to Williams College at the sophomore level meant intensive tutoring in Latin and Greek – and the opportunity to study and translate from classical models. When seven months in Williamstown fell short of his expectations, he anticipated switching to Yale’s more nourishing intellectual climate – until a review of family finances with his father dashed those plans. With the greatest reluctance, he then turned to reading for the law as the obvious career choice dictated by his talents and the available options. Fours and a half years later, at the very end of 1815, he began his practice, resolved to make diligence his means of subduing distaste for a profession he felt had been forced upon him. Nevertheless, the “witchery of song” still enticed. No longer an acolyte to Pope and Neo-Classicism, Bryant was now under the spell of the Graveyard Poets and, chiefly, the freshening Romantic innovations of William Wordsworth. Despite having vowed constancy to the law that furnished him a livelihood, he continued to court the muse, much like a husband relishing the guilt of his infidelities as relief from tedium. Then, just when he seemed on the cusp of accepting a doom of small-town obscurity, a fortuity...