A History of American Literature

202 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865

For many contemporary readers, the leading American poet of the earlier half of

the nineteenth century was William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878). In fact, some of his

contemporaries went so far as to honor him as the founding father of American

poetry. Certainly, the honor was justified as far as the subjects of Bryant’s poetic

landscapes were concerned. Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts and

spent most of his adult life as a newspaper editor in New York City, a poem like “The

Prairies” (1834) is sufficient proof of his awareness of the great lands to the west. As

its opening lines indicate, it is also evidence of Bryant’s realization that all the new

regions of America might require the development of new tools of expression.

“These are the gardens of the Desert,” “The Prairies” begins; “these / The unshorn

fields, boundless and beautiful, / For which the speech of England has no name.” But

whatever the native loyalties involved in his choice of subject, and whatever Bryant

might say about the irrelevance to that subject of “the speech of England,” when it

came to writing rather than talking about poetry, Bryant preferred to imitate English

models. The success of his poem “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood” (1821),

for example, depends on the reader accepting the assumption that he or she and the

poet form part of the same polite community. Bryant becomes almost Augustan

here in his dependence on large abstractions (“truth,” “guilt”), poetic diction

(“school of long experience,” “haunts of nature,” “the marge”), and unparticularized

description: all used in the evident belief that the poet, although broad and even

vague in his gestures, will be understood because he is talking to an audience with

interests and values similar to his own. The poem confirms rather than demon-

strates or explores.

And, within these limitations, Bryant was undoubtedly skillful. “Thanatopsis”

(1821), for instance, a poem that was published in its first version when Bryant was

only 16, opens in a Wordworthian vein: “To him who in the love of Nature holds /

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks / A various language.” It then goes on

to demonstrate the poet’s mastery of the blank verse form, as he alters tone, pace,

and mood to capture the “various language” of the natural landscape. Similarly, in

“To a Waterfowl” (1821), Bryant uses an alternating pattern of long and short lines

to capture the hovering movement of the bird’s flight:

Whither, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

Even here, however, the poet cannot or will not resist the conventional. The bird and

its surroundings are described in terms that are heavily reliant on poetic diction

(“plashy brink,” “weedy lake,” “rocking billows”); and the description moves

remorselessly to the point where the poet can draw the appropriate, cheering moral.

“He who, from zone to zone, / Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, /”

the poem concludes, “In the long way that I must tread alone, / Will lead my steps

aright.” Most of Bryant’s best poetry, like “To a Waterfowl” and “Thanatopsis,” was

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