William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" — the great American meditation on death and nature — while still in his teens in rural Massachusetts. When his father submitted it to the North American Review in 1817, one editor reportedly doubted that anyone on this side of the Atlantic could have written it.

Bryant went on to edit the New York Evening Post for half a century, becoming a powerful voice for abolition and for the creation of Central Park. New York's Bryant Park bears his name.

"To a Waterfowl," written when he was a discouraged young lawyer watching a lone bird cross the sunset, turns the sight into one of the most quietly reassuring poems in American literature.