Youth and education.docVIP

Youth and education Bryant was born on November 3, 1794,[1] in a log cabin near Cummington, Massachusetts; the home of his birth is today marked with a plaque.[2] He was the second son of Peter Bryant, a doctor and later a state legislator, and Sarah Snell. His maternal ancestry traces back to passengers on the Mayflower; his fathers, to colonists who arrived about a dozen years later. His paternal fathers line goes from Peter, to Phillip, to Icabod and Mr. Stephen Bryant who came to America and married Mehitable Standish the granddaughter of Capt. Myles Standish also of the Mayflower. 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 two years at Williams College, he studied law in Worthington and Bridgewater in Massachusetts, and he was admitted to the bar in 1815. He then began practicing law in nearby Plainfield, walking the seven miles from Cummington every day. On one of these walks, in December 1815, he noticed a single bird flying on the horizon; the sight moved him enough to write To a Waterfowl.[3] Bryant developed an interest in poetry early in life. Under his fathers tutelage, he emulated Alexander Pope and other Neo-Classic British poets. The Embargo, a savage attack on President Thomas Jefferson published in 1808, reflected Dr. Bryants Federalist political views. The first edition quickly sold out—partly because of the publicity earned by the poets young age—and a second, expanded edition, which included Bryants translation of Classical verse, was printed. The youth wrote little poetry while preparing to enter Williams College as a sophomore, but upon leaving Williams after a single year and then beginning to read law, he regenerated his passion for poetry through encounter with the English pre-Romantics and, particularly, William Wordsworth. [edit] Poetry Although Thanatopsis, his most famous poem, has been said to date from 1811, it is much more prob