Bryant, William Cullen - David J. Moriarty (essay date 1978)
David J. Moriarty (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "William Cullen Bryant and the Suggestive Image: Living Impact," in William Cullen Bryant and His America, edited by Stanley Brodwin and Michael D'Innocenzo, AMS Press, 1983, pp. 209-22.
[In the following essay, originally presented at the 1978 Centennial Conference at Hofstra University, Moriarty re-evaluates Bryant's poetic imagery from a modernist point of view, suggesting that the poet's nature images are still alive, renewable, suggestive, for the reader of today.]
One suspects that the literary critics have too often risen to defend a "denatured" Bryant, the one whose reputation as a poet has been assaulted by neglect and misunderstanding for the greater part of these one hundred years since his death. Acting as curators in a museum of dead ideas and forms, such critics do Bryant as much a disservice as the school teachers, who forced so many of us to memorize sections of William Cullen...
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