William Cullen Bryant
1794–1878
Biography
William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was an American poet, lawyer and newspaper editor. Born in Cummington, Massachusetts, he began writing verse as a youth; although he trained for the bar and practised law for a time, poetry and public affairs never lost their hold on him. In 1825 he moved to New York City, and for nearly half a century from 1829 he edited the New York Evening Post, using its columns to press the political and social causes he believed in.
Bryant is counted among the fireside poets, a group of nineteenth-century American writers whose accessible verse was widely read and became a familiar presence in American homes. His best-known poem, Thanatopsis, is a meditation on death and nature that shows the influence of English Romantic writers, and his lyric To a Waterfowl, which watches a lone bird cross the sky at sunset, is still widely anthologised. Late in life he also translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into English verse, a large undertaking that showed his lasting devotion to the classics.
Poems by William Cullen Bryant is the collection on this site. It gathers the verse on which his reputation as a poet was built, with its woods and rivers, its meditations on time and mortality, and its clear, measured lines. Read alongside his long years as an editor, it shows how Bryant saw literature and public life as connected: the poet who wrote about death in the forest was also the editor who wrote about the questions of his day.
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Books
Poems by William Cullen Bryant
by William Cullen Bryant
William Cullen Bryant's poems on American woods, rivers and prairies, from Thanatopsis and To a Waterfowl to The Death of the Flowers, with his translations from the Spanish, German and Provençal. They helped found a native American poetry in the first half of the 19th century.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.