Thanatopsis

"Thanatopsis" is a poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Meaning 'a consideration of death,' the word is derived from the Greek 'thanatos' (death) and 'opsis' (view, sight).

William Cullen Bryant was born in 1794 in Cummington, Massachusetts. Bryant grew up in a Puritan home with his father, Peter Bryant, a prominent doctor. William Cullen Bryant's early education came from his father. In his early life Bryant would spend a great deal of time in the woods surrounding his family's New England home, and read of the extensive personal library his father had. Bryant's first published poem was "The Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times", a satirical work concerning Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807. It was released in a Boston newspaper in 1808. In 1810 Bryant was forced to leave Williams College for lack of money. Instead of a formal education, he started studying law, and began learning an eclectic mix of poetry, such as the works of as Isaac Watts and Henry Kirke White, and verses like William Cowper's "The Task" and Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene".

When and where Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" is unclear, and Bryant himself could not remember when he wrote the verse. According to Parke Godwin, Bryant's friend, Bryant wrote the poem when he was seventeen years old in mid-1811, just after he had left Williams College. In History of American Literature, two dates are stated for the authoring of "Thanatopsis", 1811 and 1816. Bryant's inspiration for "Thanatopsis" came after reading William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, as well as Robert Blair's "The Grave", Beilby Porteus's "Death" and Kirke White's "Time". After Bryant had left Cummington to begin his law studies, his father discovered a manuscript in Bryant's desk drawer, that contained "Thanatopsis" and a fragment of a poem, which would be published under the title "The Fragment", and later titled "An Inscription upon the Entrance to a Wood". He sent the two poems to the editors at the North American Review, where they were published in September 1817.

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