William Ellery Channing

Background

William Ellery Channing was born on November 29, 1818 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Walter Channing and his wife, Barbara Perkins. His father was an eminent physician and a professor in the Harvard Medical School. His mother died while he was yet young, and Ellery--often so called to distinguish him from his uncle, William Ellery Channing --spent an unhappy childhood in the home of a great-aunt, Mrs. Bennett Forbes of Milton.

Education

Later he attended the Boston Latin School and a private school and in the summer of 1834 entered Harvard College. There he remained for only a few months. Already as fractious and incalculable as he was brilliant, he soon found chapel tiresome, and stayed away; then the whole program became a bore, and young Channing walked out. When his family discovered his whereabouts, he was at Curzon's Mill, on the Merrimac, about four miles west of Newburyport, writing poetry. The college authorities took a sensible view of the escapade, but Ellery did not return.

Career

About this time he seems to have decided that poetry was his vocation and that any other activity of his must be subordinate to it. His first verses to appear in print were "The Spider, " in the New England Magazine for October 1835. With a friend, Joseph Dwight, he moved out to Woodstock, McHenry County, in 1839; but learning, as Hawthorne did at Brook Farm, that prolonged bodily labor is not conducive to writing, he sold his quarter-section within a year. Next he sojourned in Cincinnati, where his uncle, James H. Perkins, was minister of the Unitarian Church. There he gave private lessons, wrote for newspapers, dallied over law books, and fell in love with the demure, pretty younger sister of Margaret Fuller. In the East he met Emerson, who read some of his poems in manuscript and wrote an appreciative critique of them for the Dial, I, 220-32 (1841). Channing and Ellen Fulier were married in the autumn of 1842 and settled in Concord in order to be near Emerson. In 1844 Channing was in New York writing for Horace Greeley's Tribune; in 1845 he made a visit of a few months to France and Italy; from 1855 to 1858 he was absent from Concord again as an editor of the New Bedford Mercury. Except for these excursions he made Concord his home till the end of his long life. His personality, which was both elfin and elvish and "as naturally whimsical, " according to Thoreau, "as a cow is brindled, " lives in the writings of his friends, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and F. B. Sanborn. To Thoreau he was especially devoted, for they had much in common. He was his almost invariable companion in his walks around Concord and accompanied him also on his trips to Cape Cod, Maine, and Canada. He wrote the first biography of Thoreau and edited several of the posthumous volumes of his friend's writings. Separating from his family, he lived alone for a number of years in a small house in Concord. His old age was passed in the home of Franklin B. Sanborn. Channing's published works are: Poems (1843); Poems, Second Series (1847); Conversations in Rome between an Artist, a Catholic, and a Critic (1847); The Woodman and Other Poems (1849); Near Home, a Poem (1858); The Wanderer, a Colloquial Poem (1871); Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873; enlarged edition, 1902); Eliot, a Poem (1885); John Brown and the Heroes of Harper's Ferry, a Poem (1886), and Poems of Sixty-Five Years (selected and edited by F. B. Sanborn, 1902). Several occasional poems were also published separately, and he contributed prose and verse to the Dial and to other magazines. As a poet Channing was and is almost completely unknown. Edgar Allan Poe greeted his first volume with a merciless review in Graham's Magazine for August 1843, and the rest was silence. The faults of diction, meter, and syntax for which Poe excoriated him were deplored by Channing's friends also. Emerson complained that Channing should have lain awake all night to find the true rhyme for a verse instead of availing himself of the first that came. Thoreau recommended that he discipline himself by writing in Latin and described his companion's style with matchless adequacy as "sublimo-slipshod. " But Channing's case was beyond help; a thoroughgoing Transcendentalist in his poetic practise, he could only improvise, he could not revise and polish. Yet in spite of his uncertain technique he is a genuine poet, capable of long passages and whole poems of complete felicity. His poetry, moreover, has atmosphere. It is as indigenous to New England as the russet apple, and has the russet's tang and homely flavor. All that it needs is the anthologist who will separate the sound fruit from the culls.

Achievements

• The Transcendentalists thought his poetry among the best of their group's literary products.

Works

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  • Discourses on War (Classic Reprint)

    (Ruskin, in one of his eloquent passages, declares that wa...)

  • The Wanderer: a Colloquial Poem

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton: With Explanatory Notes, and a Life of the Author

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist; With Memorial Verses

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Eliot : A Poem

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

  • Poems of sixty-five years

    (Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this clas...)

Connections

Father:

Walter Channing

He was an eminent physician and a professor in the Harvard Medical School

Mother:

Barbara Perkins

Uncle:

William Ellery Channing

Friend:

Joseph Dwight

Great-aunt:

Mrs. Bennett Forbes