William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.

The story of the romance between John and Priscilla is the subject of a famous narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was also their descendant.

[3] Bryant described their relationship: "If I were permitted to draw the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me interesting, story of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley.

I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for more than forty years.

His father advised Bryant to purse a legal career as his best available choice, and the disappointed poet began to study law in Worthington and Bridgewater in Massachusetts.

During his collegiate studies and his reading for the law, he wrote little poetry, but encounters with the Graveyard Poets and then William Wordsworth regenerated his passion for what Bryant called "the witchery of song.

In 1817, his father took some pages of verse from his son's desk, and at the invitation of Willard Phillips, an editor of the North American Review who had previously been tutored in the classics by Bryant, submitted them along with his own work.

"[7] Someone at the North American joined two of the son's discrete fragments, gave the result the Greek-derived title Thanatopsis ("meditation on death"), mistakenly attributed it to the father, and published it.

Bryant spent months working on "The Ages", a panorama in verse of the history of civilization, culminating in the establishment of the United States.

From 1816 to 1825, Bryant depended on his law practice in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to sustain his family financially but he traded his unrewarding profession for New York City and the promise of a literary career.

With the encouragement of a distinguished and well-connected literary family, the Sedgwicks, he quickly gained a foothold in New York City's vibrant cultural life.

By 1832, after publishing an expanded version of Poems in the U.S. and, with the assistance of Washington Irving, in Great Britain, Bryant began to be recognized as one of his generation's greatest poets.

Bryant's stories over the seven-year period from his time with the Review to the publication of Tales of Glauber Spa in 1832 show a variety of strategies, making him the most inventive of practitioners of the genre during this early stage of its evolution.

An early supporter of organized labor, with his 1836 editorials asserting the right of workmen to strike, Bryant also defended religious minorities and immigrants, and promoted the abolition of slavery.

[10] He "threw himself into the foreground of the battle for human rights"[11] and did not cease speaking out against the corrupting influence of certain bankers in spite of their efforts to break down the paper.

[12] According to newspaper historian Frank Luther Mott, Bryant was "a great liberal seldom done justice by modern writers".

[16] In his final years, Bryant shifted from writing his own poetry to a blank verse translation of Homer's works.

He was known for his attention to trees on his land, and later in life he expressed concerns that deforestation in the United States would prove disastrous for American agriculture.

[17] Bryant died in 1878 of complications from an accidental fall suffered after participating in a Central Park ceremony to honor Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini.

"[22] Edgar Allan Poe praised Bryant and specifically the poem "June" in his essay "The Poetic Principle": The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuous—nothing could be more melodious.

[23]Editor and children's writer Mary Mapes Dodge wrote that Bryant's poems "have wrought vast and far-reaching good in the world."