SOURCE: "Sensuousness in the Poetry of William Cullen Bryant," in University of Mississippi Studies in English, Vol. 7, 1966, pp. 25-42.

In the following essay, Harrington investigates the "profound influence of the senses" in Bryant's poetry.

Even before James Russell Lowell's celebrated comparison of William Cullen Bryant to an iceberg, Bryant was accused of coldness of heart. And long after the more extreme of Lowell's remarks had been denied, similiar criticisms continued to be made. Indeed scholars of our own century have not felt inclined to exempt Bryant completely from the charge. Yet modern critics generally agree with Norman Foerster that "Bryant's genius, after all, was by no means altogether didactic and mortuary; sensuous pleasure … is prominent in his relation to external nature."

In a study of anything so subjective as poetry, the importance of sensuousness, pleasure in the blandishments of the senses, is undeniable. However much of the intellectual...