After duly allowing for the common tendency to make fame retroactive, we cannot doubt that “Thanatopsis” secured immediate and, relatively, immense recognition. The best judges agreed that at last a bit of genuine American literature was before them; the uncritical but appreciative, from ministers to school children, read, learned, admired, and quoted the grave, sonorous lines.
Thanatopsis,--a Vision of Death! A strange corner-stone for the poetic literature of the nation which had only recently sprung into life,--a nation conscious as no other had been of its exuberant vitality, of its boundless material resources, of its expansiveness and invincible will. Yet neither the glory achieved nor the ambition cherished fired the imagination of the youthful poet. He looked upon the earth, and saw it but a vast grave; he looked upon men and beheld, not their high ambitions nor the great deeds which blazon human story, but their transience, their mortality. Nothing in life could so awe him as the majestic mystery of death.
The mood, I believe, is not rare among sensitive and thoughtful youths, who, just as their faculties have ripened sufficiently to enable them to feel a little of the unspeakable delight of living, are staggered at realizing for the first time that death is inevitable, and that the days of the longest life are few. That this terrific discovery should kindle thoughts full of sublimity need not surprise us; but we may well be astonished that Bryant at seventeen should have had power to express them in a poem which is neither morbid nor religiously commonplace.
In 1821 Bryant received what was then the blue ribbon of recognition in being asked to deliver a poem before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He wrote “The Ages,” read it in Cambridge and printed it, together with “Thanatopsis” and a few other pieces, in a little volume. The previous conviction was confirmed; every one spoke of Bryant as _the_ American poet. Even the professional critics--those sapient fellows whose obtuseness is the wonder of posterity, the clique which pooh-poohed Keats, and ha-hahed Wordsworth, and bear-baited Carlyle--made in Bryant’s case no mistake. Although one of them, indeed, declared that there was “no more poetry in Bryant’s poems than in the Sermon on the Mount,” yet the opinions were generally laudatory, and the critics were quick in defining the qualities of the new poet. They found in him something of Cowper and something of Wordsworth, but the resemblances did not imply imitation; Bryant might speak their language, but it was his also. No one questioned the genuineness of his inspiration, and not for a quarter of a century after the publication of “Thanatopsis,” that is, not until the early forties,--when Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, and Emerson began to have a public for their poetry,--did any one question Bryant’s primacy. He had been so long the _only_ American poet that it was naturally assumed that he would always be the _best_. He had redeemed America from the reproach of barrenness in poetry, as Irving and Cooper redeemed its prose, and Americans could feel toward no others as they felt toward him.