John Gardiner Calkins Brainard
(1796-1828)
Connecticut
Evert A. & George L. Duyckinck,
The Cyclopaedia of American Literature 966
(Philadelphia: William Rutter & Co., 1880) (Vol. 1)
Poet, attorney and journalist
John G.C. Brainard was born in Connecticut at New
London, on October 21, 1796. His father was a state court judge.
Brainard was educated at Yale and then took up the study of law.
But law seems to have been
little adapted to his tastes and constitution, and after a brief
trial of its practice at Middletown he abandoned it in February,
1822, for the editorship of a weekly paper at Hartford, the Connecticut
Mirror. He is said to have neglected the politics of his paper,
dismissing the tariff with a jest, while he displayed his ability
in the literary and poetical department. His genius lay in the
amiable walks of the belles-lettres, where the delicacy
of his temperament, the correspondence of the sensitive mind to
the weak physical frame, found its appropriate home and nourishment
* * * *
In 1825 a first volume of Poems was published
by Brainard at New York, mostly made up from the columns of his
newspaper, which was favorably received. Not long after, in 1827,
the poet was compelled by the inroad of consumption on his constitution
to retire from his editorship. He went to the east end of Long
Island for his health, and has left a touching memorial of his
visit to the sea, in which the animation of his genius overcomes
the despondency of his broken frame. He suffered and wrote verses
till his death at his father's home, at New London, September
26, 1828.
After his death a second edition of Brainard's poems
appeared in 1832, enlarged from the first, with the title Literary
Remains, accompanied by a warmly written sketch of the poet's
life by Whittier. This has been since followed by a third edition,
with a portrait, an elegant and tasteful volume, published by
Edward Hopkins, at Hartford, in 1842.
[Source: Evert A. & George L. Duyckinck, The
Cyclopaedia of American Literature 966-67 (Philadelphia: William
Rutter & Co., 1880) (Vol. 1)]
John
Gardiner Calkins Brainard
Early American Fiction
University of Virginia
John Gardiner Calkins Brainard
The Poets of Connecticut
( New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 6th ed., 1873)
John
Gardiner Calkins Brainard
Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889)
(James Grant Wilson & John Fiske eds.)(6 vols.)
John Gardiner Calkins Brainard
Wikipedia
Edgar
Allen Poe on Brainard
A
Few Words About Brainard
Edgar Allen Poe (1842)
Poems
[The
Fall of Niagara] [Epithalamium] [Epithalamium] [Mr. Merry's Lament
for "Long Tom"] [The Deep] [The
Indian Summer] [The
Two Comets] [Stanzas]
Poetry
John Gardiner Calkins Brainard, Occasional Pieces
of Poetry (New York: Printed for E. Bliss and E. White, Clayton
& Van Nordern, Printers, 1825) [on-line text]
________________________, The Poems of John G.
C. Brainard (Hartford: S. Andrus and Son, 1841) [on-line text] [on-line
text]
________________________, The Poems of John G.C. Brainard: A New
and Authentic Collection, With an Origian Memoir of His Life
(Hartford: S. Andrus and Son, 1847) [on-line text] (Hartford: Edward Hopkins, 1862)
Writings
John Gardiner Calkins Brainard, Letters Found in
the Ruins of Fort Braddock including an interesting American Tale
(Brooklyn, New-York: O. Wilder and J.M. Campbell. A Spooner, Printger,
1824) [on-line text]
Fort Braddock Letters; or a Tale of the French
and Indian Wars, in America, at the Beginning of the Eighteenth
Century (Worcester: Published by Dorr & Howland, 1827)
Bibliography
James Gardiner Calkins Brainard 1796-1828,"
in Jacob Blanck (compiler), 1 Bibliography of American Literature
269-274 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955)
J.G. Whittier, The Literary Remains of J.G.C. Brainard:
With a Sketch of His Life (Hartford: P.B. Goodsell, 1832) [on-line text]
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