Entries tagged with “bryant” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

As we begin work on our cultural history of New York City, Bryan and I are starting with the premise that one of the things that will make our distinctive is its organization around different "scenes" that have existed during the city's history. This principle was inspired by the account of the "downtown scene" that Bryan gives during our Writing New York lecture course at NYU. Where possible we want to locate these scenes in particular geographic locations such as neighborhoods, parks, buildings, or even street corners. And we're looking for "tour guides" to help us make our way through these different scenes, polymathic individuals whose encounters with the city and its denizens will suggest the networks of cultural affiliation that will help us give shape to our history.

So I've been working on Walt Whitman's New York. I'm working for the moment on Whitman's early career and my "scene" is centered on the ferry between Brooklyn and New York. I'm expecting Walt to lead me around Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side, to the opera, to the lecture hall to hear Emerson lecturing about the duties of the poet.

Today, however, I've been thinking about another encounter: between Whitman and William Cullen Bryant, the author as a young man of "Thantopsis" and editor-in-chief, from 1829 to 1878, of the New York Evening Post. I started by thinking about whether "Thanatposis," with its blank verse and trisyllabic second line, can be seen as a precursor for Whitman's free verse experiments, but a little rummaging around the stacks led me back to this piece from Whitman's Specimen Days: