Summary: The title is from the Greek thanatos (“death”) and the suffix -opsis (literally, “sight”); it has often been translated as “Meditation upon Death”.
Due to the unusual quality of the verse and Bryant’s age when the poem was first published in 1817 by the North American Review, Richard Henry Dana, Sr., then associate editor at the Review, initially doubted its authenticity, saying to another editor, “No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses.”