The Letters of William Cullen Bryant

This is the only collection ever made of Bryant's letters, two-thirds of which have never before been printed. Their publication was foreseen by the late Allan Nevins as "one of the most important and stimulating enterprises contributory to the enrichment of the nation's cultural and political life that is now within the range of individual and group effort."

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was America's earliest national poet. His immediate followers-Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman-unquestionably began their distinguished careers in imitation of his verses. But Bryant was even more influential in his long career as a political journalist, and in his encouragement of American art, from his lectures at the National Academy of Design in 1828 to his evocation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. Between the appearance of his first major poem, "Thanatopsis," in 1817, and his death sixty-one years later at the age of eighty-three, Bryant knew and corresponded with an extraordinary number of eminent men and women. More than 2,100 of his known letters have already been recovered for the present edition.