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Biography
Whittier grew up on the Massachusetts farm of his Quaker
family. His first poem, published in a local paper when he
was fourteen, attracted the attention of abolitionist William
Lloyd Garrison, who urged the boy to pursue his education.
Though the family had long suffered in poverty, Whittier
managed to put himself through two years of school at the
Haverhill Academy. In his twenties Whittier began editing
regional newspapers. He served one term in the Massachusetts
legislature (1835) and was one of the founding leaders of
the antislavery Liberty Party in 1839. Throughout the 1830s,
1840s, and 1850s, he continued his newspaper work, editing
several abolitionist papers in a time before the antislavery
movement was generally favored in the North. At the same
time, he wrote prose and poetry about his own rural region,
collected in such volumes as Legends of New England (1831)
and Lays of My Home (1843). Whittier's reputation
received a boost in 1857, when the new Atlantic Monthly started
to publish his poems and humorous tales. His long poem Snow-Bound (1866)
ensured Whittier's fame and financial well-being for the
remaining years of his life.
Explorations
Whittier is often looked at as (at best) a middlebrow artist,
because he sought and reached a large audience of ordinary
Americans. There is no question that he helped to establish
poetry as a legitimate literary form in the United States.
However, his poetry has a richness and complexity which might
easily be overlooked.
1. For Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (1866), a long
verse-sketch of New England family life, Whittier locks
himself into rhymed tetrameters. Why? In what ways is this
form appropriate to the subject? What risks does he run
in staying with such prosody through nearly eight hundred
lines of verse? How does Whittier achieve variety within
this form?
2. This poem is about a community forced indoors and
coerced into conversation, storytelling, and human relationships.
At what moments does the poem show us the discovery, or
rediscovery, of people whom the speaker, in milder times,
has taken for granted?
3. Snow-Bound is interspersed with elegiac passages,
meditations on death, loss, and the meaning of various
lives. Compare these elegiac passages to Bryant's Thanatopsis or
other Romantic elegies that you have read. Where does Whittier
find consolation? What causes him to take heart and move
beyond his grief?
Other sites to consult:
Whittier
overview. From "A Student's History of American
Literature" on the Bibliomania site.
John
Greenleaf Whittier. An interesting biography
of Whittier from an 1888 book called Prominent
Men and Women of the Day.
Selected
poems of John Greenleaf Whittier. Includes
the complete texts of six selected poems.
Whittier's
Anti-Slavery Ode to New Hampshire. An article
on the SeacoastNH.com site that asks "Poet John Greenleaf
Whittier praised New Hampshire for its abolitionist
stand in 1846. But did we deserve it?" Includes a
look at New Hampshire Abolitionism, Whittier in New
Hampshire, and the poem in which Whittier praised
the state.
http://www.kimopress.com/whittier.htm:
Some information on Whittier from a Quaker printing press.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/whitti.html:
Some of Whittier’s poems, with notes on life and work. http://users.erols.com/kfraser/authors/whittier.html: A
biography of Whittier.
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