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William Cullen Bryant was the son of Peter Bryant, a physician and surgeon who was also a man of literary tastes, that is, he not only encouraged his son to read (and, consequently, to the development of his talent), but also was himself an occasional writer of verse. He would be the one who would help to publish the first poems by his son. .
As a child, William Cullen was frail and sickly. This fragility will lead him not to work in the fields but to be sent to an uncle's house to keep on studying. As he grew he began early to take the unusual delights in the beautiful environment of his country home. The boy then became a lover of nature. He was a precocious child -he began to learn before two and was sent to school at four. At nine, he began writing little poems, and even dared to paraphrase in verse a fragment of the book of Job. .
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.
As I said before, when he was fourteen, he was sent to the house of an uncle, who was a clergyman in North Brookfield, to begin the study of Latin. He mastered its grammar in only eight months, at the same time he was reading the New Testament, all of Virgil and the Orations of Cicero. The following year he attended a school in Plainfield to learn Greek, a task to which he gave himself with his whole soul, as he said once. Nevertheless, he could not finish university, since his father felt incapable of affording it. .
Although his student life was abruptly finished, his poetic talents were not forgotten, since he found in his father's library several volumes of the contemporary English poets, who directly influenced his own expression. Among these poets we could cite Cowper, Thomson and his Seasons, Southey and Kirke White.