page_title: Thanatopsis
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Thanatopsis / Background
context_page_description: "Thanatopsis" is a poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Meaning 'a consideration of death', the word is derived from the Greek 'thanatos' and 'opsis'.
context_section_description: William Cullen Bryant was born in 1794 in Cummington, Massachusetts. Bryant grew up in a Puritan home with his father, Peter Bryant, a prominent doctor. William Cullen Bryant's early education came from his father. In his early life Bryant would spend a great deal of time in the woods surrounding his family's New England home, and read of the extensive personal library his father had. Bryant's first published poem was "The Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times", a satirical work concerning Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807. It was released in a Boston newspaper in 1808. In 1810 Bryant was forced to leave Williams College for lack of money. Instead of a formal education, he started studying law, and began learning an eclectic mix of poetry, such as the works of Isaac Watts and Henry Kirke White, and verses like William Cowper's "The Task" and Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene".
  When and where Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" is unclear, and Bryant himself could not remember when he wrote the verse. According to Parke Godwin, Bryant's friend, Bryant wrote the poem when he was seventeen years old in mid-1811, just after he had left Williams College. In History of American Literature, two dates are stated for the authoring of "Thanatopsis", 1811 and 1816. Bryant's inspiration for "Thanatopsis" came after reading William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, as well as Robert Blair's "The Grave", Beilby Porteus's "Death" and Kirke White's "Time". After Bryant had left Cummington to begin his law studies, his father discovered a manuscript in Bryant's desk drawer, that contained "Thanatopsis" and a fragment of a poem, which would be published under the title "The Fragment", and later titled "An Inscription upon the Entrance to a Wood". He sent the two poems without his son's knowledge to the editors at the North American Review, where they were published in September 1817.    The editors added an introduction to Thanatopsis in a completely different style.  The part written by the author begins with "Yet a few days,".  The author republished the poem in 1821 in a collection of works called Poems.  He replaced the introductory section, made a few minor changes to the text and added more material after the original end of the poem, which was "and make their bed with thee!".  Below is the revised version of 1821 which was retained in all later publications of the poem:
caption: A painting of William Cullen Bryant from 1878
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