Between these two influences, nature without and puritanism within, the poet grew up; in their shadow he lived and died; little else of consequence is reflected in the poems that are his best memorial.
[Sidenote: THE CITIZEN]
The visible life of Bryant lies almost entirely outside the realm of poesie. He as fitted for Williams by country ministers, as was customary in that day; but poverty compelled him to leave college after two brief terms. Then he studied law, and for nine or ten years practiced his profession doggedly, unwillingly, with many a protest at the chicanery he was forced to witness even in the sacred courts of justice. Grown weary of it at last, he went to New York, found work in a newspaper office, and after a few years' apprenticeship became editor of The Evening Post, a position which he held for more than half a century. His worldly affairs prospered; he became a "leading citizen" of New York, prominent in the social and literary affairs of a great city; he varied the routine of editorship by trips abroad, by literary or patriotic addresses, by cultivating a country estate at Long Island. In his later years, as a literary celebrity, he loaned his name rather too freely to popular histories, anthologies and gift books, which better serve their catchpenny purpose if some famous man can be induced to add "tone" to the rubbish.
[Sidenote: THE POET]
And Bryant's poetry? Ah, that was a thing forever apart from his daily life, an almost sacred thing, to be cherished in moments when, his day's work done, he was free to follow his spirit and give outlet to the feelings which, as a strong man and a Puritan, he was wont to restrain. He had begun to write poetry in childhood, when his father had taught him the value of brevity or compression and "the difference between poetic enthusiasm and fustian." Therefore he wrote slowly, carefully, and allowed ample time for change of thought or diction. So his early "Thanatopsis" was hidden away for years till his father found and published it, and made Bryant famous in a day. All this at a time when English critics were exalting "sudden inspiration," "sustained effort" and poems "done at one sitting."
Once Bryant had found himself (and the blank verse and simple four-line stanza which suited his talent) he seldom changed, and he never improved. His first little volume, Poems (1821), contains some of his best work. In the next fifty years he added to the size but not to the quality of that volume; and there is little to indicate in such poems as "Thanatopsis" and "The Flood of Years" that the one was written by a boy of seventeen and the other by a sage of eighty. His love of poetry as a thing apart from life is indicated by the fact that in old age, to forget the grief occasioned by the death of his wife, he gave the greater part of six years to a metrical translation of the Greek poet Homer. That he never became a great poet or even fulfilled his early promise is due partly to his natural limitations, no doubt, but more largely to the fact that he gave his time and strength to other things. And a poet is like other men in that he cannot well serve two masters.
THE POETRY OF BRYANT. Besides the translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey there are several volumes of prose to Bryant's credit, but his fame now rests wholly on a single book of original poems. The best of these (the result of fifty years of writing, which could easily be printed on fifty pages) may be grouped in two main classes, poems of death and poems of nature; outside of which are a few miscellaneous pieces, such as "The Antiquity of Freedom," "Planting of the Apple Tree" and "The Poet," in which he departs a little from his favorite themes.
[Sidenote: POEMS OF DEATH]
Bryant's poems on death reflect something of his Puritan training and of his personal experience while threatened with consumption; they are also indicative of the poetic fashion of his age, which was abnormally given to funereal subjects and greatly influenced by such melancholy poems as Gray's "Elegy" and Young's "Night Thoughts." He began his career with "Thanatopsis" (or "View of Death"), a boyhood piece which astonished America when it was published in 1817, and which has ever since been a favorite with readers. The idea of the poem, that the earth is a vast sepulcher of human life, was borrowed from other poets; but the stately blank verse and the noble appreciation of nature are Bryant's own. They mark, moreover, a new era in American poetry, an original era to replace the long imitative period which had endured since Colonial times. Other and perhaps better poems in the same group are "The Death of the Flowers," "The Return of Youth" and "Tree Burial," in which Bryant goes beyond the pagan view of death presented in his first work.
That death had a strange fascination for Bryant is evident from his returning again and again to a subject which most young poets avoid. Its somber shadow and unanswered question intrude upon nearly all of his nature pieces; so much so that even his "June" portrays that blithe, inspiring month of sunshine and bird song as an excellent time to die. It is from such poems that one gets the curious idea that Bryant never was a boy, that he was a graybeard at sixteen and never grew any younger.