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Authors
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
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Brenda Wineapple has edited a new collection of Whittier’s Selected Poems (2004), but see also Robert Penn Warren’s John Greenleaf Whittier’s Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (1971). An interesting collection of Whittier’s nonfiction is Edwin Harrison Cady and Harry Hayden Clark’s Whittier on Writers and Writing: The Uncollected Critical Writings (1971). J Samuel T. Pickard’s Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (1894) was superseded by John Greenleaf Whittier: Friend of Man (1949), John B. Pickard’s John Greenleaf Whittier: An Introduction and Interpretation (1961), Pickard’s three-volume Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (1975), and Roland H. Woodwell’s John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography (1985). For a bibliographical guide, see Albert J. von Frank’s Whittier: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (1976). Pickard edited a collection of criticism, Memorabilia of John Greenleaf Whittier (1968), but even more useful is Jayne K. Kribbs’s Critical Essays on John Greenleaf Whittier (1980).
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.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
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?
