William Ellery Channing (1818–1901)

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This article is about William Ellery Channing, the Transcendentalist poet. For the Unitarian theologian, see William Ellery Channing.

William Ellery Channing (June 10, 1818–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.

William Ellery Channing, 1818-1901

Channing was born in Boston 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 form 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 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." Edgar Allan Poe reviewed it with a sting:

His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes them to be. They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been printed at all.

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 Frank B. Sanborn wrote of him:

In all these wanderings and residences his artist eye was constantly seeking out the finest landscapes, and his sauntering habit was to take his friends and introduce them to scenery they could hardly have found for themselves. He showed Thoreau the loveliest recesses of the Concord woods, and of the two rivers that came slowly through them; he preceded Thoreau at Yarmouth and Truro and the Highland shore of Cape Cod; and he even taught Emerson the intimate charm of regions in Concord and Sudbury which he, the older resident and unwearied walker, had never beheld. . . . In mountain-climbing and in summer visits to the wilder parts of New England he preceded Thoreau, being more at leisure in his youth, and less bound by those strict habits of study which were native to Thoreau all his life.

In 1873 Channing was the first biographer of Thoreau, publishing Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. He 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.