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

William Ellery Channing (1818-1901) 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 dissolute or lazy by many of his contemporaries; nevertheless, the Transcendentalists thought his poetry among the best of their group's literary products.

After dropping out of Harvard University in 1834, Channing spent a year in Cincinnati and Illinois. In 1842 he married Ellen Fuller, a sister of Margaret Fuller. While living in Concord, Massachusetts, he was praised, and published, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and befriended by Henry Thoreau. Some speculation identifies him as the "Poet" of Thoreau's Walden; the two were frequent walking companions. Amos Bronson Alcott famously said of him in 1871, "Whim, thy name is Channing"; Thoreau called his literary style "sublimo-slipshod." Edgar Allan Poe reviewed his first volume of poems (published in 1843) more unkindly still:

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.

Ellery Channing was the first biographer of Thoreau, publishing in 1873 Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist.

External link

• A brief Channing biography, with photo from the Concord Free Public Library