Bryant's Practice in Composition and Revision

Tremaine McDowell

doi:10.2307/458603

Bryant's Practice in Composition and Revision

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020

Tremaine McDowell

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Tremaine McDowell*: Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

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Whenever a poet allows us to follow his creative processes, we are grateful—even though he may be no supreme artist but merely a solid craftsman. An account of the manner in which William Cullen Bryant composed his poems will therefore interest students not only of American letters but of poetry at large. From youth to old age, Bryant believed that great poetry and indeed all true poetry has its origin in the emotions of the poet.

Type: Research Article
Information: PMLA , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1937 , pp. 474 - 502

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/458603 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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^{page 474 note 1} “Stanzas,” New-York Review, 11 (1826), 216–217—Better known is the revised text of this poem published in 1832 as “I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion.” This later version is less emotional in tone and less personal in its revelations.

^{page 474 note 2} “Lectures on Poetry” (delivered in New York in 1826), Prose Writings (New York, 1884), i, 8, 10.

^{page 474 note 3} “The Poet,” Thirty Poems (New York, 1864), p. 208.—Bryant's romantic conception of poetry is summarized in William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections, ed. Tremaine McDowell (New York, 1935), p. lvi–lxiii.

^{page 474 note 4} The “dark power” of this poem is, of course, not poetic inspiration in general but the particular inspiration which comes from external nature.

^{page 474 note 5} Letter to Bronson C. Keeler, New York, August 12, 1863, quoted in Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant (New York, 1883), ii, 386–387.—Bryant went on to say: “I don't invoke the Muse at all. … It appears to me that inspiration has no more to do with one intellectual process than another.” He concluded less rationally: “I am not prepared to say that there cannot be a direct action of mind upon mind without the interposition of a bodily presence.”

^{page 474 note 6} Letter to Professor Joseph Alden of Lafayette College, quoted in idem, ii, 270–271.

^{page 474 note 7} Letter to Richard Henry Dana, Sr., New York, November 11, 1833, quoted in idem, i, 297.

^{page 474 note 8} “The Poet.”

^{page 474 note 9} The changes in his poems made by Bryant after publication are recorded in the notes to Poetical Works, ed. Parke Godwin (New York, 1883), and to Representative Selections.

^{page 474 note 10} See Poetical Works, i, 351–352.

^{page 474 note 11} Idem, i, 349.

^{page 474 note 12} Autobiographical fragment by Bryant, printed in Godwin, i, 27.

^{page 474 note 13} Examples are the manuscripts of “The Late Eclipse,” “On the Last Judgment,” “The Endless Knot,” “A Poem Addressed to Mr. A. Bryant,” “A Version of a Fragment of Simonides,” “Part of a Chorus of Sophocles Translated”—all composed before Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis.”

^{page 474 note 14} “A Lifetime.”

^{page 474 note 15} See Tremaine McDowell, “The Juvenile Verse of William Cullen Bryant,” SP, xxvi (1929), 109–111.

^{page 474 note 16} Hampshire Gazette, April 23, 1817; Pittsfield Sun, April 20, 1818; North American Review, vi (1818), 382–383.

^{page 474 note 17} The birth of “Thanatopsis” has been variously dated; but it is now clear that Bryant began the poem in September or October of 1811, before his seventeenth birthday (Representative Selections, pp. 389–390).

^{page 474 note 18} Bryant's hand changed so considerably between 1811 and 1817 that it is difficult to set an exact date for this manuscript.

^{page 474 note 19} Since Bryant's father copied both the sixteen-line poem and “Thanatopsis” before leaving them with the editors of the Review, their mistake was a natural one. For details of the first publication of “Thanatopsis,” see Tremaine McDowell, “Bryant and The North American Review,” American Literature, i (1929), 15–18.

^{page 474 note 20} W. F. Johnson, “Thanatopsis Old and New,” North American Review, ccxxiv (1927), 556–572.—Neither in his manuscripts nor in his collected poems does he give any hint that he intended to incorporate the poem in “Thanatopsis.” Secondly, it is clear that the concluding section of the poem (beginning “Thus shalt thou rest… ”) is still fluid in his mind—here he is still composing rather than revising. In manuscript A it runs only to three lines and part of a fourth, added, to judge from the handwriting, after the body of the poem has been set down. Then in 1817 he revises these lines, adds a few more, but does not complete the poem.

^{page 474 note 21} The passage beginning “All through the march …” and ending “… must follow them” appears only in a preliminary draft of Manuscript B. It is here inserted at the proper point in the final draft.

^{page 474 note 22} Carl Van Doren, “The Growth of Thanatopsis,” Nation, ci (1915), 432–433.—This excellent article is more concerned with the growth of Bryant's thought than with the actual writing of the poem.

^{page 474 note 23} Unpublished passage in manuscript of autobiographical sketch printed, with omissions, by Godwin and cited above.

^{page 474 note 24} Even here the record of the poet's toil is incomplete, for it has not been possible to include cancelled readings in these transcripts.

^{page 474 note 25} These revisions are enumerated in Representative Selections, pp. 391–392.

^{page 474 note 26} The line now reads: “Oh let me by the chrystal valley-stream.”

^{page 474 note 27} “The Rivulet,” “March,” “Summer Wind,” “After a Tempest,” “Autumn Woods,” “November,” “To a Cloud,” “Hymn to the North Star,” “A Forest Hymn,” and others.

^{page 474 note 27a} For comparison with these four manuscript versions, the final published text is appended:

Years change thee not. Upon yon hill

The tall old maples, verdant still,

Yet tell, in grandeur of decay,

How swift the years have passed away

Since first, a child, and half afraid,

I wandered in the forest shade.

Thou, ever-joyous rivulet,

Dost dimple, leap, and prattle yet;

And sporting with the sands that pave

The windings of thy silver wave,

And dancing to thy own wild chime,

Thou laughest at the lapse of time.

The same sweet sounds are in my ear

My early childhood loved to hear;

As pure thy limpid waters run;

As bright they sparkle to the sun;

As fresh and thick the bending ranks

Of herbs that line thy oozy banks;

The violet there, in soft May dew,

Comes up, as modest and as blue;

As green amid thy current's stress,

Floats the scarce-rooted watercress.

And the brown groundbird, in thy glen,

Still chirps as merrily as then.

^{page 474 note 28} Exceptions are “The Old Man's Funeral” and “I Broke the Spell That Held Me Long,” both elaborately reworked during these years.

^{page 474 note 29} Quoted in Godwin, ii, 271–272, footnote.

^{page 474 note 30} Idem, i, 303.

^{page 474 note 31} Very pointed are Bryant's suggestions in a letter commenting on this poem sent him by Stoddard—the last letter which Bryant wrote (May 27, 1878; quoted in idem, ii, 398–399).

^{page 474 note 32} Ibid.

^{page 474 note 33} Idem, i, 303; ii, 398.

^{page 474 note 34} Idem, i, 297–298.

^{page 474 note 35} For example, as rhymes for lake, he jots down bake, ache, break, cake, flake, lake [sic], make, opaque, quake, rake, stake, stake, take, wake. From them he selects break and flake. Only rarely does he mistake eye for authentic rhymes, as when he sets down as rhymes for cowl: bowl, hole, pole, etc.

^{page 474 note 36} Review of Bryant, Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, xxxii (1846), 182–186.

^{page 474 note 37} For comments on Bryant's insistence on purity of diction and for a copy of his index expurgatorius. see Allan Nevin, The Evening Post (New York, 1922), pp. 347–349.

^{page 474 note 38} Godwin, i, 297.

^{page 474 note 39} Review of Henry Pickering, North American Review, xix (1824), 427.

^{page 474 note 40} “Lectures on Poetry,” op. cit., i, 5.

^{page 474 note 41} Cummington, August 11,1870, in Godwin, ii, 289. Bryant restored the first reading in A Library of Poetry and Song but not in his collected poems.

^{page 474 note 42} In collecting the poem Bryant wisely dropped this stanza, in which poetry (the mother) woos him (the babe) to return from the practice of law (the cliff). There are five manuscript drafts of the stanza, which, illustrated by a detailed engraving, appeared in the following form in The Atlantic Souvenir for 1826:

Thus where the cliff, abrupt and steep,

Looks down upon the sullen deep,

Far from his mother's side, the child

Sat playing on the verge, and smiled:—

She laid her bosom bare, and won

From the dread brink her truant son.

^{page 474 note 43} The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London, [1925?]), “Introduction,” p. xliii.

^{page 474 note 44} The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford, 1906), “Introduction” and notes; The Works of Lord Byron. Poetry, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London, 1898–1904), introductions to poems, notes on manuscripts, and collations of editions; The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London, 1912), footnotes.

^{page 474 note 45} The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Killis Campbell (Boston, [1917]), “Introduction” and textual variants.

^{page 474 note 46} August 3, 1870, quoted in Godwin, ii, 288.

^{page 474 note 47} To Dana, May 9, 1834, quoted in idem, i, 305.

^{page 474 note 48} Quoted by de Selincourt, op. cit., p. xliii, footnote.

^{page 474 note 49} Godwin, i, 305.

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