Bryant. In 1818 the young lawyer William Cullen Bryant published a review of Solyman Brown's verse Essay on American Poetry in the North American Review. Not particularly interested in or impressed by Brown's poetry, Bryant instead used the opportunity to make his own pronouncements on the state of poetry in the American republic. Bryant criticized American poets for too closely imitating older English poets, especially Alexander Pope and John Dryden, and suggested that such imitation had left early American poetry artificial, empty, and cold. As a poet Bryant himself had been influenced by newer movements in English poetry, particularly by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), which called for the use of a simple and less ornate language. Considered in his own time to be the "first of American poets," Bryant earned that title because his work was clearly different from earlier...