William C. Bryant Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Cullen Bryant was born on November 3, 1794, in Cummington, Massachusetts, to Dr. Peter Bryant and Sarah Snell Bryant. His father, a physician with literary tastes, recognized his son's early promise and encouraged him to read widely and write. Bryant attended local schools and briefly enrolled at Williams College in 1810. Family finances and his own ambitions led him to leave college and read law in Worthington and Bridgewater. He was admitted to the bar in 1815 and began practicing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he would spend a decade balancing legal work with an increasingly visible literary life.

Emergence as a Poet
Bryant showed precocious talent. As a teenager he published The Embargo (1808), a satirical poem aimed at national policies he judged harmful to New England commerce. More enduring was his meditation on mortality and nature, Thanatopsis, likely drafted when he was still in his teens. His father submitted it to the North American Review; editors such as Richard Henry Dana Sr. recognized its power, and it appeared in 1817, startling readers with its mature voice. Poems like To a Waterfowl and A Forest Hymn further established him as a leading American voice within the Romantic tradition, attuned to the moral language of the natural world and to a plain yet elevated blank verse.

Marriage and Literary Consolidation
In 1821 Bryant married Frances Fairchild, whose steadiness and practical judgment supported his shift from law to letters. That same year a volume simply titled Poems gathered his best-known work to date, confirming his reputation beyond New England. Through these years he corresponded and occasionally met with other authors who were shaping an American literature separate from British precedent, including Washington Irving and, later, James Fenimore Cooper.

Move to New York and the Evening Post
In 1825 Bryant moved to New York City to join the New-York Evening Post, initially under editor William Coleman. After Coleman's death in 1829, Bryant became editor-in-chief and part owner, a position he would hold for decades. The paper's editorial pages became his principal pulpit. He argued for free trade, sound currency, and civic improvements, and increasingly for the abolition of slavery. Colleagues such as William Leggett sharpened the paper's reformist edge; later, his son-in-law Parke Godwin worked closely with him, helping to sustain the paper's intellectual vigor.

Politics and Public Influence
Bryant's political course traced the fracturing of nineteenth-century party loyalties. Initially sympathetic to Andrew Jackson's democratic reforms, he broke with the national Democratic Party over slavery's expansion. He supported the Free Soil movement and its 1848 presidential candidate Martin Van Buren, and he later allied with the new Republican Party. On February 27, 1860, he presided at New York's Cooper Union and introduced Abraham Lincoln to a crowded hall; Lincoln's address there helped define his candidacy. Through the Civil War, Bryant supported the Union and emancipation, often at personal and commercial risk to the newspaper.

Travel, Letters, and Cultural Leadership
Bryant traveled widely in Europe and the Americas, sending home dispatches that were gathered in volumes such as Letters of a Traveller. He helped link American readers to global political and cultural currents, endorsing liberal movements abroad and reporting on art, architecture, and landscape. In New York he championed public institutions and urban improvements, advocating for parks and clean water. He lent his voice to campaigns that culminated in projects like Central Park, and he supported museums and learned societies, often delivering dedicatory or commemorative addresses that connected civic ideals to the natural beauty he celebrated in verse.

Translations and Later Writings
Late in life Bryant undertook a monumental literary project: blank-verse translations of Homer's epics. His Iliad appeared in 1870, followed by the Odyssey, which he completed in the early 1870s. These versions, praised for their clarity and dignified cadence, extended his influence into classical scholarship and brought ancient poetry to a broad American readership. He also wrote introductions and essays for illustrated works about American scenery, contributing to a visual and literary celebration of the nation's landscapes.

Personal Circles and Intellectual Milieu
Bryant's home life and friendships anchored his public labors. Frances Fairchild Bryant provided a stable household for their family and offered candid criticism of his work. In New York he moved among the so-called Knickerbocker circle, conversing with figures such as Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and James Fenimore Cooper. Editors, publishers, and reformers, among them Richard Henry Dana Sr., Parke Godwin, and other colleagues at the Evening Post, formed a network through which literary and political ideas traveled swiftly into print.

Homes and Habits
Despite his urban responsibilities, Bryant continued to draw solace from the countryside. He kept close ties to Cummington and later created a beloved retreat at Cedarmere in Roslyn, Long Island, where he gardened, walked, and revised poems. The interplay between city and nature in his daily life mirrored the balance in his writing between public principle and private meditation.

Final Years and Legacy
On a warm day in 1878, after delivering remarks in Central Park honoring the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, Bryant collapsed, suffered complications from a fall, and died in New York City on June 12. He was 83. By then he was a national figure: a foundational American poet whose Thanatopsis and To a Waterfowl became staples of school anthologies; a journalist who shaped public debate across half a century; a translator who gave new voice to Homer for American readers; and a civic leader whose advocacy for culture and parks helped define New York. Those who had read him in youth now saw in his career a model of integrity: a writer guided by nature's moral lessons and committed to a public life equal to them.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Truth - Art - Writing - Victory.

Other people realated to William: Horace Greeley (Editor), John Greenleaf Whittier (Poet), Nathaniel Parker Willis (Author), John Bigelow (Lawyer), Thomas Cole (Artist)

• 1832 Poems (expanded editions) (Collection)
• 1824 A Forest Hymn (Poetry)
• 1821 Poems (first edition) (Collection)
• 1818 To a Waterfowl (Poetry)
• 1817 Thanatopsis (Poetry)