SOURCE: "William Cullen Bryant and the Suggestive Image: Living Impact," in William Cullen Bryant and His America, edited by Stanley Brodwin and Michael D'Innocenzo, AMS Press, 1983, pp. 209-22.

In the following essay, originally presented at the 1978 Centennial Conference at Hofstra University, Moriarty re-evaluates Bryant's poetic imagery from a modernist point of view, suggesting that the poet's nature images are still alive, renewable, suggestive, for the reader of today.

One suspects that the literary critics have too often risen to defend a "denatured" Bryant, the one whose reputation as a poet has been assaulted by neglect and misunderstanding for the greater part of these one hundred years since his death. Acting as curators in a museum of dead ideas and forms, such critics do Bryant as much a disservice as the school teachers, who forced so many of us to memorize sections of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis," a poem...