Whittier, John Greenleaf

Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807–92), Massachusetts poet, born of Quaker stock, had little formal education but found his most important intellectual influences in his religion and in the books he read as a boy, especially Burns, whose poetry led him to see the romance underlying the everyday rural life of New England. His earliest poems were published in Garrison's newspaper, and similar country journals, and through the aid of Garrison he was given an editorial position on a Boston paper (1829), soon followed by similar work on country newspapers. His first book, Legends of New‐England in Prose and Verse (1831), shows his interest in local historical themes, as does his pamphlet Moll Pitcher (1832), on Molly Pitcher, and Mogg Megone (1836), a narrative of Indian life in colonial times.

Through the influence of Garrison and his own Quaker conscience, Whittier was now deflected from his original purpose of interpreting the American background to ally his writing with activities in the cause of social justice. As he says, he “left the Muses' haunt to turn the crank of an opinion mill” (c. 1833–59), becoming an ardent Abolitionist. He was elected to the Massachusetts legislature (1835), spoke at antislavery meetings, edited The Pennsylvania Freeman (1838–40) of Benjamin Lundy, and wrote tracts and the verse collected in Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question (1838). Disliking the methods of Garrison, Whittier became a founder of the Liberty party, for which he also edited newspapers. He published Lays of My Home and Other Poems (1843), and his antislavery verse was collected in Voices of Freedom (1846), which included “Massachusetts to Virginia.”

As an editor of the National Era (1847–60), he contributed to this paper most of the poems and articles which he wrote, and though he continued his antislavery work he had not forgotten his earlier interests, as may be seen in Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 1678–79 (1849). This, his only long work of fiction, is based on records of the period of the Salem witchcraft trials, and is a semi‐fictional romance uncovering the mind of Puritan New England in the manner of Hawthorne, steering a middle course between vilification and praise. Other prose works collected from this paper were Old Portraits and Modern Sketches (1850) and Literary Recreations and Miscellanies (1854). That his humanitarian interests were still predominant may be seen in Proem in his first collected Poems (1849), in which he says that though he cannot equal “the old melodious lays” of Spenser and Sidney, he can atone for his artistic limitations by “a hate of tyranny intense” and a sympathy for his “brother's pain and sorrow.” This creed can be seen in his Songs of Labor (1850).

Whittier continued also to write on antislavery matters during the eventful years prior to and during the Civil War, on subjects ranging from the Kansas‐Nebraska bill and Webster's defection in “Ichabod” to the 13th Amendment in “Laus Deo!” (1865). Meanwhile his reputation as a pure poet of the countryside was increased with The Chapel of the Hermits (1853); The Panorama and Other Poems (1856), containing “Maud Muller” and “The Barefoot Boy”; and Home Ballads, Poems and Lyrics (1860), containing “Skipper Ireson's Ride” and “Telling the Bees.” Another volume of verse, dealing with contemporary matters, was published as In War Time and Other Poems (1864), which included “Barbara Frietchie.”

After the Civil War, Whittier returned to his poetic interest in the New England scene to write his winter idyll Snow‐Bound (1866), which is considered his greatest work. This was followed by The Tent on the Beach (1867), a cycle of verse narratives in the manner of Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, but also containing his poem The Eternal Goodness, which praises the “pitying love” of God and sets forth the poet's “fixed trust” in His goodness and His love. Other volumes of this period, showing his recaptured interest in rural life and colonial history, in‐clude Among the Hills (1869), Miriam and Other Poems (1871), Hazel‐Blossoms (1875), The Vision of Echard (1878), St. Gregory's Guest (1886), and At Sundown (1890). Many of his poems have been set to music as hymns. In addition, he edited or contributed introductions to many other people's works, of which the best known is his sympathetic edition of Woolman's Journal (1871). Whittier's Letters was published in three volumes (1975).

Whittier's work, which falls roughly into three periods, has been variously estimated at different times. The poems written up to 1833, in which he is a romantic follower of Burns, are youthful works that he himself attempted to suppress. The poems from 1833 to 1859 present him as a militant Quaker, with liberal political and humanitarian beliefs, and have been most appreciated in recent years. The poems from 1859 to his death show him both as a poet of nature and of homely incidents, rising to his loftiest in Snow‐Bound, and as a thinker assured of a comprehensive religious faith that led him to become devoted to religious tolerance, humanism, and democratic justice. Whittier has consistently been praised for his ballads and such long narratives as Snow‐Bound. Many of his poems suffer from either sentimentality or lack of technical ability, and even his best works are not altogether free from faults. Much of his poetry, which is still widely read for its simple sentiment or moral beauty, is marred by flaccidity, diffuseness, undue affection for preaching, and lack of discipline. He properly estimated one of his technical faults by saying he wrote “good Yankee rhymes, but out of New England they would be cashiered.” Both his virtues and his vices probably derive from the fact that he was a man of conscience rather than of intellect, and lacked the power to discriminate between his poems of force and spontaneity and his inferior verse.