- This article is about William Ellery Channing, the Transcendentalist poet. For the Unitarian theologian, see William Ellery Channing.
William Ellery Channing (November 29, 1817 — December 23, 1901) was a Transcendentalist poet, nephew of the Unitarian preacher Dr. William Ellery Channing. (His namesake uncle was usually known as "Dr. Channing," while the nephew was commonly called "Ellery Channing," in print.) The younger Ellery Channing was thought brilliant but undisciplined by many of his contemporaries. Amos Bronson Alcott famously said of him in 1871, "Whim, thy name is Channing." Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists thought his poetry among the best of their group's literary products.
"All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.""Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.""Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.""Error is discipline through which we advance.""Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.""Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.""Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.""Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.""Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.""Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.""God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.""God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.""Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.""Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.""He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled.""How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.""Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.""It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.""It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.""It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.""Life has a higher end, than to be amused.""No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.""No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.""Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.""One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.""The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.""The great hope of society is in individual character.""The home is the chief school of human virtues.""The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.""The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.""The reveries of youth, in which so much energy is wasted, are the yearnings of a Spirit made for what it has not found but must forever seek as an Ideal.""The world is governed by opinion.""Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.""We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure."
Channing was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Dr. Walter Channing, a physician and Harvard Medical School professor. He attended Boston Latin School and later the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, then entered Harvard University in 1834, but did not graduate. In 1839 he lived for some months in Woodstock, Illinois in a log hut that he built; in 1840 he moved to Cincinnati. In 1841 he married Ellen Fuller, the younger sister of transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, and they began their married life in Concord, Massachusetts where they lived a half-mile north of The Old Manse as Nathaniel Hawthorne's neighbor.
In Concord he devoted himself to poetry and chopping wood. He was befriended by Henry David Thoreau, and praised and often published in The Dial by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some speculation identifies him as the "Poet" of Thoreau's Walden; the two were frequent walking companions.
Channing wrote to Thoreau in a letter: "I see nothing for you on this earth but that field which I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you." Thoreau adopted this advice, and shortly after built his famous dwelling beside Walden Pond.
In 1843 he moved to a hill-top in Concord, some distance from the village, and published his first volume of poems, reprinting several from The Dial. Thoreau called his literary style "sublimo-slipshod".
In 1844—1845, Channing separated from his family and restarted his wandering, unanchored life. He first spent some months in New York City as a writer for the Tribune, after which he made a journey to Europe for several months. In 1846 he returned to Concord and lived alone on the main street, opposite the house occupied by the Thoreau family and then by Alcott. During much of this time he had no fixed occupation, though for a while, in 1855-1856, he was one of the editors of the New Bedford Mercury. After enumerating his various wanderings, places of residence, and rare intervals of employment, his housemate Franklin Benjamin Sanborn wrote of him:
In 1873, Channing was the first biographer of Thoreau, publishing Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist.
Death
Channing died December 23, 1901 in Concord. He is buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord on Author's Ridge directly facing his longtime friend Thoreau.
Critic Edgar Allan Poe was particularly harsh in reviewing Channing's poetry in a series of articles titled "Our Amateur Poets" published in Graham's Magazine in 1843. He wrote, "It may be said in his favor that nobody ever heard of him. Like an honest woman, he has always succeeded in keeping himself from being made the subject of gossip". A critic for the Daily Forum in Philadelphia agreed with Poe, though he was surprised Poe bothered reviewing Channing at all. He wrote: "Mr. Poe, the most hyper-critical writer of this meridian, cuts the poetry of William Ellery Channing, Junior, if not into inches, at least into feet. Mr. C's poetry is very trashy, and we should as soon expect to hear Bryant writing sonnets on a lollypop as to see Mr. Poe gravely attempt to criticize the volume."