"The Reign of Nature"; or, Mr Bryant's Wordsworth

Abstract

In 1825, William Cullen Bryant arrived in New York as reviews editor for New York Review and Athenaeum Magazine, already with mission. Seven years earlier, at twenty-four, he had informed The North Review that poetry in New World was hopelessly moribund; Timothy Dwight's ponderous The Conquest of Canaan (1785) was remarkable for its unbroken monotony, Joel Barlow's Columbiad (1807) was utterly destitute of interest, and Philip Freneau was dismissed as a writer of inferior verse. All three exemplified poetic culture addled by sickly and affected imitation (Bivant 5: 50, 51, 54) As indeed (in all candour) they did. Now, aged thirty-one, Bryant delivered four authoritative lectures on poetry at New York Athenaeum, lauding new poetry of Old World. His mission was reformation of poetry and campaign theme, in effect, close thy Pope, open thy Wordsworth. The poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Shelley and others, he told audience, is bold, varied, impassioned, irregular, and impatient of precise laws, beyond that of any former age. It exhibits the freshness, vigor, and perhaps also disorder, of new literature (Bryant, 5: 31-2). Twelve years later, Emerson's belated American Scholar lecture will demand new poetry with original relation to universe, which (Emerson implies) would necessarily be American. Bryant by contrast, candidly acknowledged--at least in private--how Lyrical Ballads had already liberated him from what Emerson would call courtly muse. I shall never forget, Richard Henry Dana famously writes, in Hazlittian vein:with what feeling my friend Bryant, some years ago, described to me effect produced upon him of meeting for first time with Wordsworth's ballads. He said that upon opening book, thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in heart, and face of Nature, of sudden, to change into strange freshness and life. He had felt sympathetic touch from an according mind, and ... instantly powers and affections shot over earth and through kind (Dana, 148) Bryant's father gave him copy of Lyrical Ballads in 1810, year or so before Bryant Jr. began to produce and first authentically Romantic poems. When some of these--including Thanatopsis, Inscription for entrance to wood and Waterfowl were published together in North Review in 1817, effect of new language was comparable to that of debut of Ted Hughes with Hawk in Rain in 1957. One editor told another: you have been imposed upon; no one on this side of Atlantic is capable of writing such verses. (1) Bryant who candidly adopted Wordsworth as what he called a sort of poetical master (Letters 1: 235) (2) absorbed more thoroughly than anyone principles of Prefaces, and went on to formulate emost succinct of Romantic manifestos: the elements of poetry, he decided retrospectively in 1876, lie in natural objects, in vhicissitudes of human life, in emotions of human heart, and relations of to man and what characterised Romantic renovation of poetry was that learned to go directly to nature for their imagery, instead of taking it from what had once been regarded as common stock of poets (Bryant 5: 158). He read Wordsworth voraciously, read him with recurring sense of awe, and defended aspects of own poetic practice by appealing to Wordsworth's example. Rhyming blossom and bosom, he tells Dana in 1833, is acceptable because Wordsworth does so, and his rhymes are generally exact (Letters 1: 385; touchstone in this case is Foresight, one of least regarded poems in Poems, in Two Volumes). According to Fenimore Cooper, while some writers reaped some praise once in while, Bryant was lauded as author of America (not quite, as title of Gilbert Muller's admirable biography seems to suggest, author of America). …