Older than Bryant were three single-poem men,--Francis Scott Key, Joseph Hopkinson, and John Howard Payne; yet, so far as I can learn, their three poems were written later than “Thanatopsis,” and, after all, neither “The Star Spangled Banner,” nor “Hail Columbia,” nor “Home, Sweet Home,” would rank high as poetry. Likewise, though Fitz-Greene Halleck was older than Bryant by four years, and once enjoyed a considerable vogue, his verse is now obsolescent, if not obsolete. In the anthologies--those presses of faded poetical flowers--you will still find some of his pieces; but which of us now regards “Marco Bozzaris” as the “finest martial poem in the language”? Bryant’s priority among his immediate contemporaries is thus clearly established; furthermore, a considerable interval separated him from that group of American poets who rose to eminence in the two decades before the civil war. Bryant was born in 1794, Emerson in 1803, Longfellow and Whittier in 1807, Holmes and Poe in 1809, Lowell and Whitman in 1819. An almost unexampled precocity also set Bryant’s pioneership beyond dispute. But when we call Bryant the earliest American poet, and “Thanatopsis” the earliest American poem, we must not suppose that both had not had many ineffectual predecessors. Versifiers, like milliners, flourish from age to age, and their works are forgotten in favor of a later fashion. Who the forgotten predecessors of Bryant were, he himself will tell us. Being asked in February, 1818, to write an article on American poetry for the _North American Review_ he replied:-- “Most of the American poets of much note, I believe, I have read,--Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, Humphreys, Honeywood, Clifton, Paine. The works of Hopkins I have never met with. I have seen Philip Freneau’s writings, and some things by Francis Hopkinson. There was a Dr. Ladd, if I am not mistaken in the name, of Rhode Island, who, it seems, was much celebrated in his time for his poetical talent, of whom I have seen hardly anything; and another, Dr. Church, a Tory at the beginning of the Revolution, who was compelled to leave the country, and some of whose satirical verses which I have heard recited possess considerable merit as specimens of forcible and glowing invective. I have read most of Mrs. Morton’s poems, and turned over a volume of stale and senseless rhymes by Mrs. Warren. Before the time of these writers, some of whom are still alive, and the rest belong to the generation which has just passed away, I imagine that we could hardly be said to have any poetry of our own; and indeed it seems to me that American poetry, such as it is, may justly enough be said to have had its rise with that knot of Connecticut poets, Trumbull and others, most of whose works appeared about the time of the Revolution.”[35] [35] _A Biography of William Cullen Bryant_, by Parke Godwin, i, 154.