As a contemporary reader, I am struck by the wastefulness which he takes for granted. The buffalo is killed for sport and for its tongue, not for meat (and that was the case), some "fine" reason for almost exterminating a species! They destroy the bee hive not to harvest the honey, but more because it's sporting. Granted, these are my modern sensibilities kicking in and it wouldn't be fair to judge Irving by them--or those around him with the attitudes he describes. At least he's sorry he killed the buffalo, and realizes that it was only the thrill of the sport that spurred him--and seems a little ashamed. Somehow I doubt if that feeling was shared by his "comrades," though it may have been by his more romantic readers (who regret that they will never see a buffalo).
Is he a romantic here? In the sense that he is describing scenes and people that were vanishing even as he wrote about them (and he knew that), perhaps he is. The treasures of Nature were most recognized as they were being diminished, and the Romantics were right there to point out to people the values of nature which they were taking for granted and were, as an urbanizing society, losing touch with.
However, it was Bryant who really puts the romantic turn on the prairie landscape. Unlike Irving, Bryant's "heart swells, while the dilate sight / Takes in the encircling vastness." He doesn't gallop along after buffalo, but he says, "As o'er the verdant waste I guide my steed" and is reminded constantly of "A race, that long has passed away." The Indians he describes are long dead and the prairies are filled with mounds of their bones. "The red man, too,/ Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long" and "In these plains/ The bison feeds no more." Even the bee is here, who "Fills the savannas with his murmurings,/ And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,/ Within the hollow oak." Bryant sees much more as lost than Irving does, and he alternately is thrilled by the solitude and thought of death and nostalgic about it. He also looks forward to "The sound of that advancing multitude / Which soon shall fill these deserts." (He can't imagine the noises of Kansas City though!) There's much description, but the description is really the base for a poem about solitude and the passing of time. Now that's romanticism! It's also sentimentality, and the trick is to distinguish between the two sometimes. The footnote says that Bryant actually visited the prairie in Illinois in 1811. Clearly his visit was quite different from Irving's. His language is also quite different: lots of vague adjectives and poetic diction.
Student reading responses
One other poem is "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe." Are you familiar with the wonderful landscapes of Thomas Cole (of the Hudson River Valley school?) He put into pictures much of the emotion (and the lone figure in the romantic wilderness) you find in Bryant. Note that how he fears that Cole may lose his greatest artistic inspiration if he forgets the "earlier, wilder image" of the American landscape as he gazes on landscapes corrupted by "the trace of man." Though the romantic wants to be "in nature" and says that everyone should have that uplifting experience (as Bryant says repeatedly), the experience seems to demand solitude, and is corrupted if people are there. Don't you see a bit of a paradox there? Everyone should be alone, but if everyone is there.... Alas, you need to look no further than our own efforts to "preserve wilderness" with national parks to see the same impossible paradox!
So how is Bryant romantic? He's concerned with death (and its connection with life), the past (and its connection with the present), freedom, the American landscape as a source of meaning (aesthetic, personal, and spiritual). He emphasizes individual feeling and imagination and feels uncomfortable with "crowds." He represents in words what his friends in the Hudson River Valley School were expressing in art: emphasizing concepts of harmony in nature; the use of vast panoramas to show immensity of nature and puniness of man
Like them he takes a distant and elevant perspective, viewing the scene; he uses much light and darkness and contrasts diverse aspects of nature to show the unity in variety (with man diminished).
Student Reading Responses