“To Bryant, The Poet Of Nature”: A Virtual Walking Tour with Andrew Rimby about Walt Whitman and William Cullen Bryant’s Transcendental Relationship.
Event Video Link: https://youtu.be/7q16YqGdr4U
A live historic and literary virtual tour with PhD Candidate Andrew Rimby! See the Cedarmere House & Estate, Nassau County Museum of Art, & Historic Roslyn. “To Bryant, the Poet of Nature”: Walt Whitman and William Cullen Bryant’s Transcendental Relationship.
In 1847, Whitman coined Bryant “one of the best poets in the world” while writing for the Brooklyn Eagle. And, a few years before expressing his praise for Bryant’s poetic talent, Whitman had written a poem in dedication to Bryant’s Romantic and Naturalist themes. Although a role model to Whitman, their approach to the poetic genres of Romanticism, Naturalism, and Transcendentalism differed as did their approach to abolitionism. As we virtually journey, in historic Roslyn, from Bryant’s Cedarmere to the Bryant Library, we’ll ask how to approach these two influential Long Island poets in 2021? And, what happens when you look at their poetry through an ecopoetic lens? The tour will conclude with Whitman’s poetry influencing Roslyn’s Gilded Age future, and why Edith Wharton turns to his homoerotic poetics for her own writing.
