“Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,
Spink, spank, spink;
When you can [pipe that merry old strain],
Robert of Lincoln, come back again.
Chee, chee, chee!”
NOTES AND QUESTIONS
Biography. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was the first great American poet. He was reared among the rugged Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Outside the district school, he had little teaching except that given by his mother and what he gave himself through the excellent library of his father, who was a country physician. He grew up in close touch with nature and the simple farm surroundings, and this lonely life may have tended to make him rather more serious and thoughtful than most boys of his age. By the time he was nine years old he was putting his thoughts into verse in the stately fashion of the English poets of that time. In 1811, when yet scarcely eighteen, he wrote “Thanatopsis,” now one of the world’s classics.
By this time he had studied two years at a private school and seven months at Williams College. He was ambitious to continue his studies at Yale, but his father’s circumstances compelled him to give up that hope and to face the immediate problem of earning his own living. He studied law and was admitted to practice in 1815. After a few years he went to New York, where in 1825 he became editor of the Evening Post—a position which he continued to fill with distinction for more than half a century, until his death in 1878.
And yet this busy editor of a great city newspaper found leisure from time to time to cultivate his love for verse and to continue to write poetry. His poems were popular with Americans because he chose for the most part American subjects taken from his own immediate surroundings and experience—the scenes and impressions of his boyhood, the flowers, the birds, the hills, the climate of his own New England.