A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck

William Cullen BryantProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5
Word count
80K words
Chapters
9

Tags

English Originals General Biography Group BiographyHumanistic CareLife PhilosophySocial ConductMoral Cultivation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin VerplanckAuthor: Bryant, William Cullen, 1794-1878,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Nov 1, 2003

Editor's review

This is a memorial discourse by the American poet William Cullen Bryant on Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, a representative specimen of the 19th-century American public eulogy genre. Verplanck was a politician, literary figure, and social activist; Bryant, from a contemporary's vantage, assesses his life, character, and writings in stately prose with carefully wrought sentences and the distinctive cadence of a delivered address. Its value for readers is twofold: as a concrete example of Bryant's prose style within American literary history, and as primary material for studying 19th-century New York intellectual circles and the culture of public commemoration. It is short, but its information density depends on the reader's familiarity with the figures and institutions of the time; without background knowledge, it can read as little more than a list of names and titles. It suits reading with the dual expectation of a stylistic specimen and a historical slice, rather than as a modern biography.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Look up basic biographies of Verplanck and Bryant before reading the text; the relationships will become much clearer.
  2. Read the whole text aloud as a speech, noting its paragraph progression and the rhetorical arrangement of its stately tone.
  3. Read it alongside contemporary American eulogies to compare the proportion of formulaic language and personal assessment in mourning oratory.
  4. When making excerpts, distinguish factual statements from Bryant's subjective judgments, to facilitate later scholarly citation.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9

FAQ

Who does this discourse commemorate? It commemorates Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, a 19th-century American politician, literary figure, and social activist. The discourse was written and delivered by the poet William Cullen Bryant, assessing his life, character, and writings.
Is it a biography or an essay? It is closer to a commemorative discourse than a systematic biography. It outlines Verplanck's life and character from a contemporary's perspective, with an evaluative and memorial tone; its selection of information serves the occasion of the address and is not equivalent to a complete biography.
Where does the main difficulty in reading lie? The difficulty lies in background rather than vocabulary: the text involves figures, institutions, and public affairs of the time, and without a general knowledge of 19th-century American political culture it is easy to read in a fragmentary way. It is advisable to fill in basic background first, then focus on the discourse's style and its measure of judgment.
What are some suggestions for using the Gutenberg electronic edition? This edition is a public-domain electronic text, convenient for searching and excerpting, but the digital transcription may differ in formatting. For scholarly citation, it is advisable to check against the original publication or an authoritative edition, and to note 19th-century English spelling and punctuation conventions.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

William Cullen Bryant Author · American · 1794–1878

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was an American poet and journalist born in Cummington, Massachusetts. At the age of 17 he wrote the celebrated poem "Thanatopsis" and is regarded as a representative figure of American Romantic nature poetry. Bryant served as editor of the New York Evening Post for some fifty years, advocating free trade, freedom of speech, and abolition. His works span poetry, travel writing, and criticism; the collection here includes five titles, among them Poems by William Cullen Bryant, Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, Letters of a Traveller; or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America, The Little People of the Snow, and A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck. He died in New York in 1878.