Project Bryant

I would like to further examine the differences and similarities between Whitman and his contemporaries, and in doing so, come to have a better grasp of what the poetic conventions were of the time, and the kind of culture that indirectly built up those conventions. I would like to look at William Cullen Bryant in particular, who became something of a celebrity by the time he died in 1878, and represented a certain status quo. Bryant interests me because, for one, he was considered a prodigy, publishing his first book of poetry, a political satire called Embargo, at the age of thirteen. This differs widely from Whitman, who didn’t publish until his thirties. Bryant was also a fierce editor of his work and spent an inordinate amount of time editing and revising poems before publication. I would like to see how this compares to Whitman’s editing process, and consider how this might have made their poetry different. Also, Bryant wasn’t interested in “American-ness” and this is well-worth looking into further. Using his biography, newspaper writings, poems, and whatever else, I’d ultimately like to come to some vague idea about what kind of person he was, how he thought, what he believed, and so forth. I suppose my initial question would be something like: How did William Cullen Bryant's socio-economic background, moral/religious/political convictions, and editing process influence his poetry, and what does this say about the aesthetic/intellectual/moral status-quo of the 19th Century and Leaves of Grass?