by Janet Grischy

Created on: September 20, 2008   Last Updated: March 27, 2009

The most famous writers of their day are not always the ones whose works endure. Fame is fleeting, as tastes change and modern movements in the arts come forward. New times often seem to call out for new ways of looking at the world. Yet many whose work is ignored or forgotten later find a place again, and a devoted public. These are sketches of five of the most famous American poets of the 19th century.

Emily Dickenson

Possibly the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century is Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. At least, she is famous now. In her reclusive lifetime, she had less than a dozen poems published, and most of those were edited to conform to the prevailing aesthetic. After her death, her sister Lavinia found more than a thousand of her poems, and had them published in a three-volume edition. It was heavily edited as well. However, with the appearance of an unedited collection in 1955 she found her audience and her greatest fame. She is now considered a major American poet.

Hers are introspective poems that reflect on the brevity of life and the prospect of immortality. She uses a short line, and quite often slant rhyme. (Slant rhyme is approximate rhyme in which the ending consonants are matched but not the vowels: the words room and storm slant rhyme in her "I heard a fly buzz", for example.) Most of her poems are untitled. She was not unlettered, she studied at the Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke, but her punctuation is often deliberately eccentric. Her meter she might have absorbed from hymns.

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant achieved fame in his day, not only through his romantic poetry, but through his work as the editor of the New York Evening Post, where he served for 50 years. He was born in 1794, to a distinguished family. He spent one year at Williams College, and then studied for and passed the bar. His poetry achieved critical success early in his life (Thanatopsis when he under 21, To a Waterfowl at age 27), but he felt he could not support a family with poetry. He practiced law, but came to dislike it, and finally became a journalist in New York City.

Some critics have dispraised William Cullen Bryant. He is compared unfavorably to the English poet Wordsworth, and considered someone who did not fully develop his gifts. Edgar Allen Poe praised him, however. He wrote that Bryant's value was underestimated, and complimented the voluptuous quality of some of his lines.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan

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