Valentine's Day Lesson Plan 2016
Come when the rains
Have glazed the snow and clothed the trees with ice,
While the slant sun of February pours
Into the bowers a flood of light. Approach!
The encrusted surface shall up bear thy steps
And the broad arching portals of the grove
Welcome thy entering.
William Cullen Bryant, A Winter Piece, line 60
Youth and Education
William Cullen Bryant was born on November 3, 1794, in a log cabin near Cummington, Massachusetts; the home of his birth is today marked with a plaque. He was the second son of Peter Bryant, a doctor and later a state legislator, and Sarah Snell. The genealogies of both of his parents trace back to passengers on The Mayflower. His mother can trace her lineage to John Alden and his father can trace his lineage to Francis Cooke. He was the nephew of Charity Bryant, a Vermont seamstress.
Bryant and his family moved to a new home when he was two years old. The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, his boyhood home, is now a museum. After just one year at Williams College, he hoped to transfer to Yale, but a talk with his father led to the realization that family finances would not support it. His father counseled a legal career as his best available choice, and the disappointed poet began to study law in Worthington and Bridgewater in Massachusetts. He was admitted to the bar in 1815 and began practicing law in nearby Plainfield, walking the seven miles from Cummington everyday. On one of these walks, he was inspired to write "To a Waterfowl."
"Thanatopsis" is Bryant's most famous poem. The Greek word means "Meditation on Death." Bryant's father found the poem in his son's desk and took it to a family friend at The North American Review who loved it and agreed to publish it.
When asked to give a speech at Harvard, Bryant wrote "The Ages", an epic poem about American history.
Bryant was fully established as a professional poet by 1822.
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