William Cullen Bryant

Gilbert H. Muller

Description

2008 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Proclaimed by James Fenimore Cooper to be "the author of America," William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was one of nineteenth-century America's foremost poets and public intellectuals. In this, the first major biography of Bryant in almost forty years, Gilbert H. Muller reintroduces a quintessential New Yorker who commanded the nation's literary, cultural, urban, and political life for more than half a century.

A transplanted Yankee, Bryant arrived on the unpaved streets of Manhattan in the early 1820s and he would soon find himself at the locus of the many political and cultural transformations sweeping Manhattan and the nation. The bedrock of Bryant's cultural authority was his reputation as "America's first poet," and he enthralled a nation and his peers—including Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, and Emerson—who praised the excellence of his verse. A literary celebrity for almost seventy years, Bryant served as the editor of the New-York Evening Post for five decades, and was a major force behind the establishment of Central Park, the National Academy of Design, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Drawing on previously unavailable letters and nineteenth-century files of the New-York Evening Post, Muller creates a humanistic portrait of New York City's "first citizen," establishes him as a first-rate poet, and makes a convincing case for Bryant's role in defining the idea of democratic culture in America.
Preface

1. America’s First Poet

2. Pedlar of Law and Poetry

3. The Delectable City of Gotham

4. Apprentice Editor

5. Jackson Democrat

6. Yankee Brawls

7. My Native Country

8. Leggett’s Legacy

9. Politics and Poetry

10. Among the First in the World

11. Kindred Spirits

12. Old Temples and Tombs

13. Tumults of the Noisy World

14. Lincoln

15. Days of Slaughter

16. Like One Shut Out of Paradise

17. A Century’s Space

Source Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• 19th century
• Region
• History of the Americas
• Regional
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791478288
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Author of America
Gilbert H. Muller
Jacket image of William Cullen Bryant courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
2008 Gilbert H. Muller
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Susan Petrie
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Muller, Gilbert H., 1941- William Cullen Bryant : author of America / Gilbert H. Muller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7467-9 (alk. paper) 1. Bryant, William Cullen, 1794-1878. 2. Authors, American-19th century-Biography. I. Title.
PS1181.M85 2008 811 .3--dc22 [B]
2007033406
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface
1 America s First Poet
2 Pedlar of Law and Poetry
3 The Delectable City of Gotham
4 Apprentice Editor
5 Jackson Democrat
6 Yankee Brawls
7 My Native Country
8 Leggett s Legacy
9 Politics and Poetry
10 Among the First in the World
11 Kindred Spirits
12 Old Temples and Tombs
13 Tumults of the Noisy World
14 Lincoln
15 Days of Slaughter
16 Like One Shut Out of Paradise
17 A Century s Space
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
To Laleh Parisa, Darius, Sara and Sadie Rain
PREFACE
When William Cullen Bryant died in 1878 at the age of eighty-three, his fame was universal. Newspapers across the country and Europe ran extensive obituaries on America s great poet and principled editor. Flags flew at half-mast throughout Manhattan, which for half a century had embraced this transplanted Yankee from the Berkshires as its own unique celebrity.
Bryant s funeral at All Souls Church reflected his stature and fame. He had not wanted a public funeral but got one nevertheless, with friends, dignitaries, and citizens filling the pews and overflowing into the street. One mourner, Walt Whitman, vividly recalled the crowd s final salute to the great man. The bard of river and wood, Whitman said of his old friend, was a poet who stood among the first in the world.
My effort to capture the life, times, and career of Bryant has been guided by the iconic status that he enjoyed during most of the nineteenth century. Bryant was the first major American poet to experience celebrity-a public exposure and adulation so sustained that only Robert Frost rivals him in this regard. (Celebrity aside, Bryant was also, as Harold Bloom asserts, a superb poet, always and still undervalued. ) Moreover, Bryant compounded his literary fame by serving for fifty years as editor of the New-York Evening Post . As the respected owner and editor of the Evening Post , which was not the largest newspaper in New York City but arguably the most authoritative and influential, Bryant grappled with the conflicts and controversies of his day. No wonder that Bryant s contemporaries hailed him as Manhattan s first citizen and America s first poet.
With his dual celebrity, Bryant was a key participant in the nation s literary, cultural, and political life. He promoted a national literature and art, advanced Jacksonian democracy, attacked slavery and defended the Union, helped found the Republican Party, supported revolutions in Europe and South America, spearheaded municipal reform. One of New York City s leading boosters, he was instrumental in creating the National Academy of Design, the Century Association, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A walker in the city, he could also be Gotham s most persistent critic, decrying its dirty streets, atrocious health conditions, haphazard development, rampant crime and corruption. In the end, Bryant helped make Manhattan the cultural and commercial heart of America.
Bryant offered a progressive-at times radical-vision for America. (One exception was his endorsement of Indian removal by the Jackson administration.) He took enlightened stands on workers and women; abolitionism and slavery; immigration and religion; the dangers of American expansionism and the inevitability of global revolutions. A force in American social and political life, he was unique among poets in harnessing his literary talent to the demands of daily editorial duties. In a sense, this poet of nature submerged his deepest impulses in order to serve his city and country. When Bryant in the Evening Post opposed capital punishment, reviled nativists, excoriated secessionists, or supported the rights of workers to unionize, the city and nation listened.
Bryant is a largely forgotten figure today, but his earlier fame is still with us in surprising ways. To stroll through Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library; walk down streets named after him in Roslyn, New York, or Palo Alto, California; visit Bryant libraries and schools in numerous states-above all to sample some of his finest poems like the superb To a Waterfowl or delicious Summer Wind -is to sense the hold that Bryant once had on American popular culture.
Bryant, as I present him in this book, was not only a celebrity but a flesh-and-blood character driven by complex and often combative emotions and opinions fueled by an American epic stretching from the age of Jefferson to the Gilded Age. By offering an account of his passions and preoccupations, triumphs and failures-all enacted on the stage of a great city linked to a turbulent nation-I try to restore Bryant to his rightful place as a compelling and exemplary figure in American life and letters.

Anyone writing today on William Cullen Bryant must begin by acknowledging the collected Letters , astutely edited by William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss; these six volumes were unavailable to previous biographers. Here students, scholars, and critics will find a trove of information on Bryant s literary, philosophical, and political development. Moreover, in these letters, Bryant emerges as a thoughtful and modest soul, devoted family man, loyal friend, and consummate clubman. He was not the cold, saturnine figure depicted by his son-in-law Parke Godwin (whom Bryant excluded from his will) that influenced later accounts of his life.
In my research, I have been guided in my search for additional primary materials by unfailingly helpful staffs at the New York Public Library, New-York Historical Society, New York Society Library, Library of Congress, Roslyn Library, and Cedarmere. To all of these people I am indebted.
I want to especially thank James Peltz, the interim director at SUNY Press, for his support of and faith in this book. For a superb job in copy-editing the manuscript, I thank Dana Foote and Sybil Sosin. To Kelli Williams-LeRoux, the senior production editor at the Press, I owe a special debt for keeping the project on track. The Press s readers guided my revisions and made the book better. Among the specialists who read the manuscript, I am most grateful to Bruce Michelson, who read the biography twice and improved it significantly each time.
1 AMERICA S FIRST POET
In my ninth year I began to make verses, some of which were utter nonsense.
- An Autobiography of Mr. Bryant s Early Life
I
William Cullen Bryant was a celebrity for almost seventy-five years. For virtually the entire nineteenth century, he had been at the center of the nation s ferment-first as America s foremost poet and then, for fifty years, as its most distinguished newspaper editor. No one had greater cultural authority than this self-made man from rural New England. Already a famous poet when he left western Massachusetts for Manhattan in 1825, he had reinvented himself as a metropolitan man and in the process had helped to define the trajectory of American culture and democracy.
Bryant was a unique celebrity in his intertwined influence as America s premier poet and crusading editor. Famous since childhood, celebrated for decades as America s first poet and New York City s first citizen, he had been instrumental in creating the lineaments of a distinctively American poetry and criticism. Moreover, as the nation s most respected newspaper editor, he wielded political influence. As arguably the country s foremost cultural authority, Bryant had championed a national literature and art, freedom of speech and the press, Jacksonian democracy, urban improvement, the Republican party of Fr mont and Lincoln, an end to slavery, and the preservation of the Union. He had helped to create coherence for American culture.
Although not as flamboyant as his rival, Horace Greeley of the Tribune , over the years Bryant was the steadier and more reliable champion of liberal social and political causes. Bryant s old adversary Greeley, never consistent in his opinions or predictable in his behavior, had gone crazy following his quixotic presidential bid in 1872 and died a broken man. Bryant was still moving well on the public stage. With his gnomish head and white, flowing beard, he seemed to many Americans the mythic embodiment of the nation s literature and the rise of American democracy. He was Emerson s representative man, Carlyle s poetic and literary-even prophetic-hero.
No wonder his brusque, boisterous friend, James Fenimore Cooper, who was s