William Cullen Bryant was born in a log house in the hills of western Massachusetts, the son of a country doctor who loved books. He wrote verse almost as soon as he could write. At thirteen he published a satirical poem attacking President Jefferson, and his proud father had it printed as a pamphlet.

A few years later, as a teenager, Bryant wrote the first version of “Thanatopsis,” a meditation on death (the title is Greek for “a view of death”). It tells the reader not to fear dying, since we will lie down with all the great and the humble who have gone before, in the “one mighty sepulchre” of the earth. According to the family story, his father found the poem in a desk drawer and sent it to the North American Review in Boston, where it was published in 1817. One editor reportedly refused to believe that anyone in America could have written it.

Bryant trained as a lawyer and practiced for nearly ten years in a small Massachusetts town, but he disliked it. In 1825 he moved to New York, and soon he joined the New York Evening Post. Within a few years he was its editor and part owner, and he ran it for about half a century, until his death. Few American poets have had a longer second career.

As an editor, Bryant was a force in the city and the nation. He argued for workers’ right to organize and against slavery, helped found the Republican Party, and in 1860 introduced Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Union speech that helped make him president. He used the paper to call for a great public park for New York, an idea that became Central Park. In his seventies he translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into English blank verse.

He died in 1878, after a fall on the day he gave an outdoor speech in Central Park. The park behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street is named for him.