Write about Benjamin Frankin’s discovery/exploration and William Cullen Bryant’s opinions on nature that are linked by a shared element—this might be in the writings’ content/subject or literal features. The paper will include an examination of the two selected texts as well as an in-depth discussion of how the two pieces relate to one another. Finally, the paper will discuss the significance of these books and the research they provide to American identity and culture.
The reason why you go through this exercise is to illustrate the complex meaning and insight these writers have given to American culture/intellect (either through their mechanical craft or the topics they chose to address in their writing).
Overview
William Cullen Bryant, a poet and editor, was one of the most recognized people in 19th-century America. The acclaim he achieved as a poet in his youth followed him into his 80s; his only competitors in popularity throughout the span of his life were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Thanatopsis,” if not the best-known American poetry in the world until the mid-nineteenth century, was certainly at the top of the list, and students in home schools were frequently expected to recite it from memory.
For 50 years, Bryant was the editor of the New York Evening Post. When he died, the entire city plunged into sorrow for its most esteemed resident, and eulogies gushed forth like they had for no other man of letters since Washington Irving, the city’s native son, died a generation before. The parallel was appropriate: Irving gave American fiction worldwide respectability, while Bryant exposed the English-speaking world to an American voice in poetry.
Bryant’s mind and personality were shaped in large part by his family’s circumstances in Cummington, Massachusetts, a little community in the Berkshire hills built from the forest only a generation before his birth. His father, Peter Bryant, a physician and surgeon, had obviously chosen to reside in Cummington to pursue Sarah Snell, whose family had relocated from the same town in eastern Massachusetts; staying at the Snell house, he won his wife.
The couple shortly encountered disaster. Whether it was because Squire Snell’s relative wealth inspired the young husband to overreach when he saw an opportunity to become wealthy, or because his efforts to build a practice were failing, he became involved in a risky business speculation and lost everything, including the humble, rough-hewn cabin.
