Further Reading on Thanatopsis by Cullen Bryant

If this poem could be summarised (and I actually doubt it, since I have never liked to summarise texts, because I think summaries in literature are only a subjective reflection on what the person who is commenting the text wants to convey at a particular moment), its theme may be mainly pantheistic, that is, nature is a reflection of the feelings of men, at the very beginning of the poem. Afterwards, if we continue reading, nature as a whole is thus presented as the tomb of men, where neither social classes nor other earthy categories are distinguished. A second deep reading will make us realise the fact that there is no God in the poem, and that our final destiny is then that of reabsorption, where “pleasant dreams” wait for us.

Once can found several versions of this poem, that I will try to explain later. The version I have chosen is the one published in 1821 in t

As I have just said, on September 17 it was the first publication of ‘Thanatopsis’. Although it was so mature a piece of writing for a boy of 17, it lacked its formal introduction –the exhortation to ‘list to Nature’s teachings’. The poem began with what is now line 17, and ended with line 66. It has made me suppose that the last part of the poem, which has a clear wordsworthian touch, was composed later. And in fact it is true.

William Cullen Bryant is often regarded as the first of our American classic poets. I say ‘classic’ since there had been previous attempts to write poetry, but its quality was pretty lesser. Bryant was not an immigrant describing the New World landscape such as previous writers had been, but a man of letters who wrote a sort of poetry which could be compared without losing at all with the one that had been and was written on the other side of the Atlantic.

The poem consists of eighty-four verses (curiously, as a matter of fact, the poet died at eighty-four, too. I have just realised that) whose metrical pattern is the iambic pentameter. Nevertheless, they have no rhyme, that is, the poem is composed in blank verse. It was a general feature of his poetry: Bryant commonly used the so-called iambic ten-syllabled line when not using stanzas. Although the use of this sort of line is a common element in the English poetry (and Bryant had widely learnt the contemporaries), it also reminds us of Latin poetry, whose metrical patterns were also based on metrical feet and not in rhyme. Perhaps the use of blank verse emphasises this ‘Latin’ overtone. Moreover, Bryant was at his best in blank verse, which he used with an easiness and power of expression unsurpassed by any other American poet.

When he was thirteen, he composed a satire which he entitled The Embargo, making reference to an unpopular act of Thomas Jefferson’s administration. His father thought it worthy of publication and in 1808 it appeared in print, but the poet would later discard it.

Some topics in this essay:
Cullen Bryant, Moreover Bryant, Lyrical Ballads, Latin Greek, William Cullen, Henry Dana, English Greek, Peter Bryant, Orations Cicero, Review September, william cullen, cullen bryant, william cullen bryant, blank verse, volume bryant’s, poem line 17, greek expression, line 17, poem line, god poem, image reabsorption, 17 line 66, son peter bryant, volume bryant’s verse, lyrical ballads,