William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant was an American poet, born on November 3, 1794, in the rural town of Cummington, Massachusetts, to encouraging and supportive parents. He was widely recognized as child-prodigy, for the publication of his first poem in the Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts at the age of twelve(Byam and Levine, 491). It was no more than a year later that he wrote the long anti-Jefferson poem, The Embargo, that was printed as a pamphlet by his father. In the year 1810, Bryant was admitted into Williams College but stopped attending after his father could no longer afford the expenses. Despite this, Bryant continued to write poetry as he prepared for a legal career by working in a law office and was admitted into the bar in 1815. Unlike poets such as Poe, Emerson, and Whitman who poetic manifestos in celebration of their individual approaches to poetry, Bryant quietly published his works without making claims of its importance (Byam and Levine, 491).

William C. Bryant unable to support himself as a poet, opened a law partnership in 1816 into the the 1820s as a lawyer. In 1821, he was wedded to Frances Fairchild and fathered two daughters. Within the same year, the reading of his poem, “The Ages,” on the progress of liberty at Harvard College, stimulated him to publish his “Poems” later that year. In addition to being a lawyer, he was also the editor of the New York Review and Atheneum Magazine in New York City. In the peak of his success, Bryant traveled within the country and abroad, writing essays on his experience traveling and also published a number of volumes of poetry between 1832 and 1876. The publication of his collected of his poems in 1876 placed a crown on his career. In 1878, Bryant died after giving...

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