William Cullen Bryant Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Cullen Bryant

No line of his poetry survives in the consciousness of his nation, and none of his editorial pronouncements still resonate from his five decades with the New-York Evening Post; yet, no frieze interpreting nineteenth-century intellectual America is thinkable without William Cullen Bryant. The fame he won as a poet while in his youth remained with him as he entered his eighties; only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson were his rivals in popularity over the course of his life. "Thanatopsis," if not the American poem best known abroad before the mid nineteenth century, certainly ranked near the top of the list, and at home schoolchildren were commonly required to recite it from memory. At Bryant's death, all 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.

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