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Can you say how these things fed the imagination of the boy, who had few books and no contact with the great world? Do you think any city lad could have written "Thanatopsis" at eighteen?
Paraphrasing "Thanatopsis": "For our gayer hours They have a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and they glide Into our darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere we are aware." Truly, a book for every mood, and a mood for every book,
Bryant's father was a Federalist; the club that conducted the Anthology and the North American Review was composed of Federalists; and the youth whose "Thanatopsis" is the chief distinction of the beginning of that Review, and the morning star of American poetry, was, as a boy of thirteen, the author of the "Embargo", a performance in which the valiant Jack gave the giant Jefferson no quarter.
But these, while well wrought in the formal eighteenth-century fashion, showed no special originality. It was with 'Thanatopsis, written in 1811, when he was only seventeen, that his career as a poet of original and assured strength began. 'Thanatopsis' was an inspiration of the primeval woods of America, of the scenes that surrounded the writer in youth.
"When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit " hopelessly checked the flow of her ideas. This class was large, and by the time Absalom's turn to read was reached, "Thanatopsis" had been finished, and so the first stanza of "The Bells" fell to him.
The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that he tacks on the end, which strikes a note entirely foreign to the true spirit of the poem. You cannot by tacking a moral to a poem give it the philosophical breadth to which I have referred. "Thanatopsis" has a solemn and majestic music, but not the unique excellence of the waterfowl poem.
Can you say how these things fed the imagination of the boy, who had few books and no contact with the great world? Do you think any city lad could have written "Thanatopsis" at eighteen?
She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children.
His first poem was Thanatopsis , which was greeted as the best poem produced in America up to that time. After being a lawyer for some time he was induced to exchange law for journalism, and acted as ed. of various periodicals. Among his best known poems are Lines to a Water-fowl, The Rivulet, The West Wind, The Forest Hymn, The Fringed Gentian, etc.
America has never lacked for versifiers, and Bryant's success encouraged a greater throng than ever to "lisp in numbers"; but few of them grew beyond the lisping stage, and it was not until the middle of the century that any emerged from this throng to take their stand definitely beside the author of "Thanatopsis."
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