Born on Decemnear Haverhill, Massachusetts, in a farmhouse that his great-great-grandfather had built in the 17th century, John Greenleaf Whittier grew up in a poor but respectable household characterized by hard work, Quaker piety, and warm family affection. Whittier’s youth-indeed, his whole life-was deeply rooted in the values, history, and traditions of rural Essex County, Massachusetts. This work-together with “ Telling the Bees,” “ Ichabod,” “Massachusetts to Virginia,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” “The Rendition,” “The Double-Headed Snake of Newbury,” and a dozen or so others-suggests not only the New England source of Whittier’s finest achievements but also the predominant appeal that folk material had for his imagination. ![]() A Winter Idyl (1866), a lovingly imaginative recreation of the good life in rural New England. Nevertheless, his collected poetry includes a core of excellent work, at the head of which stands his masterpiece, Snow-Bound. Whittier knew that he had written too much and that much of what he had written for the abolitionist movement had been quickly composed and for ends that were essentially political. Whittier was a highly regarded poet during the second half of the 19th century, enshrined in the pantheon of “Schoolroom Poets” along with William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But if Whittier’s life was dramatic for the moral, political, and, on occasion, physical conflicts it included, his poetry-the best of it-is of at least equal significance. ![]() ![]() Although he was among the most ardent of the antebellum reformers, he was saved from the besetting sin of that class-a narrowing and self-consuming zeal-by his equal insistence on tolerance, a quality he had come to cherish all the more through his study of the persecution of his Quaker ancestors. In the 30-year struggle to abolish slavery, John Greenleaf Whittier played an important role as a poet, as a politician, and as a moral force.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |