america poem by william cullen bryant summaryamerica poem by william cullen bryant summary

His youth had come to an end quite different from his expectations; dispirited, he wrote a valediction to visions of verse and of fame. He had mixed with the world and sacrificed his purity; now he could only hope that those bright visions might sometimes return, and in mercy awaken / The glories ye showed to his earlier years. He was all of 21 years old. Unluckily, while his literary fortunes were in ascendence, sorrows battered his personal life. Even so, Bryant was a beloved and highly influential figure. Obviously, Bryant was reexamining his religious beliefs, but there is nothing tentative about the perception his poem describes. Addressing Jefferson as the scorn of every patriot name, / The countrys ruin, and her councils shame, he cited cowardice before perfidious Gaul and the rumors of a dalliance with the sable Sally Hemings as reasons for Jefferson to resign the presidential chair and search, with curious eye, for horned frogs, / Mongst the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs. Dr. Bryant proudly urged his son to extend his efforts, and when the legislator returned to Boston after the holiday recess, he circulated the poem among his Federalist friendsincluding a poet of minor reputation who joined the father in editing and polishing the work. Worried about the possibility of financial ruin, he had just obtained a license to practice law in New York as insurance against calamity, but journalism posed a happier alternative. Instead, he turned once again to writing poetry, both to work through his discomfiture and to compensate for it. In prayer services he conducted for his family every morning and every evening, he made certain that religious precepts informed the Bryant childrens upbringing. The next spring, Bryant accepted an invitation from Charles Leupp, an art patron and Bryants longtime associate in the Sketch Club, to be his travel companion. Acquaintance with the famed Cuban poet Jos Maria Hrdia led him to learn Spanish and study Spanish literature, as well as to translate Hrdias poems into English. During these same months, he joined the governing committee of the Apollo Association (soon renamed the American Art Union); two years later, and twice thereafter, the organization tapped him to be its chief. The law is a hag, Charles wrote to his friend; besides, there are tricks in practice which would perpetually provoke disgust. Two Sedgwick brothers lived in New York City and sought to convince Bryant to relocate where any description of talent may find not only occupation but diversity of application. Meanwhile, Dana was growing concerned that Bryant, enmeshed in his practice and local political life, would let his talent sleep.. In Thomas Cole, whom he had also first encountered through the Sedgwicks, he found a kindred spirit, and he made common cause with the other artists at The Lunch: Asher Durand, Henry Inman, John Wesley Jarvis, and John Vanderlyn. The next 12, amazingly, he completed in less time than the first twelve, and the epics second volume appeared in June 1870. In letters, he repeatedly resolved to defeat a tendency toward indolence and to focus on his legal work. Perhaps this very pride in his soundness made him vulnerable. The Lunch, as it was known, became the hub of Bryants social life. The Act stipulated American neutrality in the hostilities between Britain and Napoleonic France, but the Northeast understood that neutrality clearly favored the Frenchand worse, that the bar to commerce with the British struck at the regions economic vital organs. A third conjecture would advance it to some unknown month as late as 1815, when he appears to have been in a creative flurry. " Thanatopsis " is an early poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Communion with her visible forms, she speaks. When Our Land Was New by Annette Wynne. Once again, he poured his energies into electing a Republican president. The poem, an ode to death, highlights key features of both the Romantic. Muller leads us through the eventful and successful life of William Cullen Bryant -- from the young genius poet and struggling lawyer of the Berkshire hills through to the culmination of his influential 50-year editorship of the New York Evening Post. Two of the Literary Gazette poems are rhymed: Rizpah, a Bible story in the vein of Greek tragedy, which Poe disparaged for the poets frisky indulgence in a rhythm singularly ill-adapted to the lamentations of the bereaved mother; and Mutation, a sonnet about the need to let agony pass and to accept death as a function of constant change. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul, and found beauty and. The astonishing immediate response to The Embargo sealed Peter Bryants determination to provide his son the humanistic education he himself had been denied. Had his intended profession inspired ambition, he might have welcomed its challenges as a means of escape from dejection, but law offered him nothing more than the prospect of a living, burdened by wearying triviality. The son of a learned and highly respected physician, Bryant was exposed to English poetry in his father's vast library. 1821, however, was its ideal moment. Robert Sandss sudden death in December 1832 deprived him of a dear friend, and the effects of political attacks on the conduct of the Evening Post during the following months exacted a still heavier psychic toll. During these same months, he joined the governing committee of the Apollo Association (soon renamed the American Art Union); two years later, and twice thereafter, the organization tapped him to be its chief. A various language; for his gayer hours. William Blake (1 poem) Walt Whitman (3 poem) John Keats (1 poem) Edgar Albert Guest (2 poem) Phillis Wheatley (4 poem) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1 poem) James Weldon Johnson (1 poem) The poetry of his middle age, however, lacked the vibrancy of his early work. Although Bryant was not consistently at his best, he had produced more poetry of high quality than any of his countrymen, yet he was still committed to a legal career. In late life, Bryant the editor and political sage had eclipsed the poet in the publics mind. Resuming the European journey that had been interrupted by Leggetts debacle in 1836, Bryant returned to Europe in 1845. On returning home to close his office in Great Barrington, he saw Charles, who reported to his brother Henry in New York that every muscle of his face teemed with happiness. A sonnet is a poem that consists of fourteen lines, typically using a form of rhyme scheme, usually consists of ten syllable lines, and can be either English or Italian. A letter to a friend records his distress: it speaks of farming or a trade, possibly even blacksmithingan implausible option given spells of pulmonary weakness and his recurrent headachesas preferable to the law should he not realize his wish to resume under-graduate studies in New Haven the next term. A visit to Robert Sedgwick in New York almost a half year before the obnoxious court ruling had, in fact, already waked thoughts of departing from the Berkshires. A preamble of sorts raises Bryants familiar questions about the meaning of mortality and obliquely alludes to his fathers deaththe echoes of Hymn to Death are quite distinctbut then, after a transition recognizing change as the way of all nature, the poem chronicles the march of civilization, age by age, to the discovery of the New World and Americas realization of historys purpose. Shortly after Bryant returned in the fall of 1849, his old friend Dana urged him to collect the 15 years of letters from his travels he had sent to the Evening Post. Instead, in spite of an onerous workload, it was proving a heady adventure. In 1842 he published The Fountain and Other Poems, all written after his return from Europe. The couple quickly met misfortune. Society at the conclusion of 1841. A rivalry between Edwin Forrest, a great American Shakespearean actor (and an intimate friend of Bryant) and an equally celebrated English tragedian attracted a mob, determined to drive the foreigner from his theater; this was bad enough, but then police and a unit of militia fired their guns into the mob, creating a massacre. Bryant contributed five poems, a translation of a Spanish ballad, and a travel account of Spain (which, like the East Indies, he had not visited), in addition to one tale of terrible cruelty and vengeance, Story of the Island of Cuba. A final volume of the annual was compiled for 1830, even though duties elsewhere taxed all three collaborators. Again, Bryants share in Francis Herbert was both varied and weighty: in addition to half a dozen poems, he wrote three tales. Except for Benjamin Franklin, no American writer had managed to support himself and his family with his pen, however meanly, and verse was patently an occupation for idlers. He kissed the children, talked much and smiled at every thing. The direct language Blair marshals into blank verse pointed the way of Bryants development; still more attractive was Blairs emphasis on acceptance of deaths inevitability and overcoming the fear of extinction. Despite the haste of its composition, The Talisman for 1828 was well received, and the collaborators, who now formed the nucleus of the Sketch Club (also known as Twenty-One, for the number of members), developed a successor for 1829this volume to accommodate other club members and to feature art work. When Bryant appraised his prospects after leaving Williams College in 1811, his passion for writing poetry appeared to be utterly without promise of a remunerative career. In proclaiming a messianic America, Bryant implicitly built a case for literary nationalism as the means of expressing Americas purpose: if The Ages was the necessary poem, Bryant was the necessary poet. The elder dames, thy haughty peers, Admire and hate thy blooming years. To him who in the love of Nature holds. Bryant had also been veering toward Democratic positions in other areas, and he admired Andrew Jackson and felt personally drawn to his good friend Pauldings good friend Martin Van Burenall of which made for comfortable relations between the notoriously fiery Coleman and his assistant editor. Short Poems about America. Full Transcript. Later that same year, Bryant left his desk at the Evening Post to travel, first to Washington, then, after swinging through the upper South, to Illinois. . More than a father, he had been a close companion and his most esteemed mentor; although his death had been foreseen for more than a year, Bryant deeply felt the loss. Four years later, he was a principal supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and after the Civil War began, he became a forceful advocate of abolition. The burden of farm chores, imposed as much for their value as moral discipline as for necessity, taxed his frail physique and delicate health, and although he was ever the prize pupil, eager to please by demonstrating his brightness, the district school imposed a strict regimen: lessons were taught under threat of the switch. Writing poetry at a steady pace for the, A visit to Robert Sedgwick in New York almost a half year before the obnoxious court ruling had, in fact, already waked thoughts of departing from the Berkshires. Occasions. Now let's go back to line 1. William Cullen Bryants reserve and his guarded nature throughout life undoubtedly were schooled by the familial constraints of his one home until he departed to practice law at 22. And to qualify as a husband, he knew, would require paying less attention to the Muse. Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 to raise funds for the . The fame he won as a poet while in his youth remained with him as he entered his 80s; only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson were. His experience of the nations great rivers, and then of the awesome sweep of prairie stirred him profoundly. Seeing that one group of poems bore titles while the rest, in Dr. Bryants hand, bore none, the editors inferred that the latter constituted a single poem about deathto which one of them, drawing on his Greek, affixed the descriptive title Thanatopsis. This sutured and misattributed version impressed the editors as the best of the submissions, but those identified as the sons from the start were also very well regarded. In addition, Bryant had come to know William Dunlap, both a painter and an eminent figure in New York theater. Taking some drafts Cullen had left behind in his desk and rewriting two others in his own hand, he submitted them to Willard Phillips, a friend of long standing from Cummington and an editor of the North American. Bryant, William Cullen, 1794-1878. The poem is presented in a stream of consciousness literary format. Eventually he would be situated at the vanguard of the Fireside Poets whose driving philosophy in writing verse was the greatest examples all took a strong emotional hold on the reader. Unlike its models, which were miscellanies by various authors, The Talisman would be entirely attributed to a single writer, Francis Herbertin fact, a pseudonym for the three friends, each of whom assumed responsibility for about a third of the annuals pages while also participating in the work of the others. Later, a special train took the body to Roslyn, Long Island, his home for 35 years, where he was interred beside his wife. The birth of a third child, another boy, further squeezed financial prospects, and six months before young Cullens fifth birthday, the Bryants resumed residence with Sarahs parents. In addition, two causes for which he had crusaded elected him to their presidencies: the American Copyright Club (which he addressed in 1843) and the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death. For a youth jarred by unexpected bereavements, the notion of a universe without God as a moral arbiter or of life without a manifest ultimate purpose was perturbing. Even so, his fiction deserves more respect than it has received. He said more about your kindness to him than I have ever heard him express before, in regard to any body. Leaving his family in the Berkshires on May Day, the newly appointed editor hurried to New York to push the first number of his publication toward press. Bryant was acceding to his evident fate, but with obvious distaste. Bryant was an American poet and editor of the Evening Post. Some of his very best poems emerged from this time. If, given his age, the pose he struck in a poem composed in 1807 was patently absurdAh me! When a letter from Channing in June 1821 apologized for soliciting literary favours that would interrupt his duties, Bryant replied that none was due to one who does not follow the study of law very eagerly, because he likes other studies better; and yet devotes little of his time to them, for fear that they should give him a dislike to law. For two years after he had completed The Ages and seen Poems praised, no alternative to reluctant fealty to his practice appeared possible. Thoughts of the evildoers left to cumber earth affront tender memories of the father, and the injustice causes him to shudder at the hymn he has written, yet he refuses to erase its stanzas: let them stand, / The record of an idle revery. Despite the enfeebling calculated ambiguity of its finale, Hymn to Death is more charged with passion than any verse Bryant would ever again write. In fact, such poetic glories as he feared would smother under the workaday routine were in gestation. I. To Verplanck (who withdrew at the last moment) and Sands, he added his editorial associate on the Evening Post, William Leggett, along with novelists Catharine Sedgwick and James Kirke Paulding. An inquisitive child, Cullen learned to make a companion of thoughts stimulated by nature. When he and Leupp returned to New York for seven weeks before sailing for Liverpool, he again glimpsed mankinds worst aspects. Takes in the encircling vastness. After a months farming for the family, he enrolled in a school in Plainfield, a few miles directly north of Cummington. At the end of 1827, after the demise of the United States Review, Bryant, in company with Robert Sands and Gulian Verplanck, promoted the idea of a Christmas gift book similar to English annuals and The Atlantic Souvenir. The collegiate venture, however, did not survive the year. Had he thought little of these efforts? This grinding determination succeeded; the following May, the firms senior partner, recognizing the young mans keener industry and, perhaps, his superior ability, sold him his share of the practice at a bargain price. Peter Bryants associations with the citys intellectuals had spurred an enthusiasm for an ambitious two-year-old publication, the North American Review, which, he wrote his son in June of 1817, should nicely serve as the means of introducing you to notice in the capital. When the son ignored this prodding, Dr. Bryant seized the initiative. Death came on June 12, 1878. As 1833 was closing, he looked forward to a respite in Europe with his family, and he began arranging for his friend Leggett to fill in for him at the Evening Post. Analysis of America William Cullen Bryant 1794 (Cummington) - 1878 (New York City) Childhood Family Life Love Nature Religion OH mother of a mighty race, A Yet lovely in thy youthful grace! That Bryant offered no new composition, despite exceptional encouragement from the North American, strongly suggests that the magazines readers scarcely noticed the poems. But in 1836, when the Harper brothers took Bryant into their publishing house, he was a most valuable asset. No such judgment has been recorded, but if he had a low opinion of his talent for such writing, it seems unlikely that he would have embarked on The Talisman, given its major emphasis on fiction. There he immersed himself in Greek from his waking hour to bedtime, and dreamed of Greek in between; at terms end in October, he could read the New Testament from end to end almost as if it had been in English. The next year, except for a spring stay at the school to learn mathematics, he spent at home, expanding his reading in the classics, being tutored in French by his father, and acquainting himself with philosophical writers and post-Augustan British poets. As a man of letters, too, though no longer consequential, he remained active. When the elder Bryants legislative duties took him to Boston, he became acquainted with the writings of William Ellery Channing and other early Unitarians and found them persuasive; although he continued to attend the Congregational church in Cummington, he refused to give public assent to Trinitarian liturgy, and a few years later he joined the Unitarian church. Then news arrived that Leggett was physically and perhaps mentally ill; to save his investment in the paper, Bryant sailed for home, alone, in early 1836. Once his father dies, however, grief causes the argument to collapse. Remembering the encounter many years later, he claimed he heard Nature for the first time speak with a dynamic authenticity: Wordsworths language suddenly gushed like a thousand springs. Quite probably, though, Wordsworths full effect did not hit until some time after Bryant had begun studying law in Worthington. "Thanatopsis" By: William Cullen Bryant Lines 1-8 Summary Line 1 To him who in the love of Nature holds The first line of this poem is confusing all by itself, so read through it to the middle of the third line - that's where the first idea ends (at the semicolon after "language"). American poet and newspaper editor, born in Cummington, Massachusetts. When a rift over succession to the editorship at the, In the spring, Bryants boosters from the, The 20th century judged The Ages harshly; even the poets major adherents omitted it from their collections of Bryants works. Unfortunately, reputation could not provide for a wife and daughter or ease his obligation toward his mother and younger siblings since his fathers death. It had grown obvious to Bryant that, if he wished to be free to travel, he would have to look elsewhere for a trustworthy assistant. Ebenezer Snell, a deacon in the Congregationalist church, studied theological writers and was as intractable in his interpretation of scripture as in his rulings as a local magistrate. At his death, all of New York City went into mourning for its most respected citizen, and eulogies poured forth as they had for no man of letters since Washington Irving, its native son, had died a generation earlier. The fact that the poem then lay unfinished for some years before its publication has occasionally been interpreted as a sign that Bryant was entering a long period of unresolved religious crisis, but the idea that a poet would transcribe a philosophical problem in carefully wrought meter only to suspend composition until he solved the problem is implausible on its face. Response to the soul, and found beauty and has received in spite of an onerous workload, it proving! Bryant returned to New York theater brothers took Bryant into their publishing,! 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