“The Father of American Song” produced his first volume of poetry in 1821. Eventually he would be situated at the vanguard of the Fireside Poets whose driving philosophy in writing verse was the greatest examples all took a strong emotional hold on the reader. Across the length of an expansive career, Bryant returned to a number of recurring motifs that themes serve the summarize the subjects he felt most capable of creating this emotional stimulation.
Death
The poem that established Bryant’s promise at an early age was “Thanatopsis” which builds upon a theme almost incomprehensibly unique in the America in which it was published in 1817. Bryant’s poems about death and mortality are steeped in a long European tradition of melancholy elegies, but most offered the uplifting promise of a Christian hereafter in which life existed after throwing off the mortal coil. Bryant’s obsession with death poetry launches an assault upon this belief with the suggestion that existence ends with physical death.
While writing “Hymn to Death” Bryant learned of the death of his father and so transformed this meditation upon mortality into a tribute to the life of his father. Likewise “The Death of the Flowers” is a mournful elegy to his sister, Sarah. “October 1866” is a final tribute to Frances Fairchild, an early love to whom various poems are addressed. The fact that Bryant comes back to the theme of dying in so many poems suggests that he was really struggling through the act of writing poetry to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of what life meant as well as perhaps using composition as a means of getting past his own fear of the unknown that lay ahead.
The Natural World
Among the most popular and highly regarded poems in the Bryant canon are “To a Waterfowl,” “The Fountain”, “Among the Trees” and “Hymn to the Sea.” While other similarities exist between them and a host of other poems, the unifying element that speaks to the very nature of the poet is an appreciation of the natural world. The poems about nature reflect a man given to studious contemplation and observation of his subject. The result are poems that are not merely celebrations of beautiful flowers and metaphorical flights of fancy on the shape of clouds.
“To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe” reveals within the sheer expansive and differentiation in the landscape of America a nobility and solemn dignity not to be found in natural world of Europe describe by its poets. “Monument Mountain” situates the man amongst the high precipices of its titular subject to reveal the folly of his superiority from a cosmic perspective. “The Rivulet” situates man’s place in the world to the perspective of time by comparing the changes made over a lifetime to the unchanged constancy of the stream carrying water to its destination. Within the poetry that considers nature in all its forms is the running theme that it is a place where order and harmony exists. “The Fountain” takes this idea of order existing in nature despite upheaval and cataclysmic changes as a direction to man to learn and follow suit: any man who tries to impose his own ideas of order on the nature is destined to live a disappointed life.
The American Poet
Bryant’s poetry was also instrumental in helping to forge the American identity, even when that identity was forced to change in order to conform to a sense of pride and mythos. Slavery comes under his poetic knife and the very institution is carved up and disposed of with a surgical precision in “The Death of Slavery.” Meanwhile “An Indian at the Burial-Place of His Fathers” foretells the rise of environmentalism by chastising America for laying waste the primitive wonderland of the frontier in the name of progress. An elegy in iambic tetrameter, the 1865 publication of “Abraham Lincoln” was one of the earliest literary works that immediately set to work transforming American’s 16th President into a mythic figure in whose accomplishments could be found the true soul of the American identity.
