Whittier (1807–1892) stands in decided contrast both in upbringing and in career with the other great New England contemporaries. All the rest were college men, graduates of either Bowdoin or Harvard between 1821 and 1838, and all were familiar from youth with the world of books. Whittier was a farm boy, sprung from untutored farming stock, and in the way of formal schooling had only two terms at Haverhill Academy, paid for with his own hard earnings. He was no less retiring in disposition than the Concord group, yet he was early drawn into the antislavery conflict, and through all his middle years (from 1833 to 1865) he was an untiring man of affairs. Emerson’s interest in politics ended with the symbolical value of the Concord town meeting; Thoreau’s was registered in his spectacular protest (see p. 224) at a pernicious national policy; Hawthorne’s was limited to the performance of duties in posts at the disposal of his political friends; but Whittier undertook the achievement of national ideals through the adoption of wise political measures. The same American to whom Emerson spoke as a thinker Whittier addressed as a voter. In consequence of this his immediate social value became greater, though the verse written in behalf of reform was inferior.[16] In spite of his active rÔle in public life, however, Whittier was very much less a man of the world than Lowell, Holmes, or Longfellow. These latter were all men of family, with advantages of college training and foreign travel. They were conscious members of the intellectual aristocracy, bred in polite usages and steeped in polite literature. When Whittier came to Boston for his first He was in every sense an Essex County man. He was born in 1807 in the township of Haverhill, to which his ancestors had come in 1638, on the farm they had owned since 1647, in the house they had built in 1688. He lived in the little three-mile strip between the Merrimac and the New Hampshire line for all his eighty-five years, first at his birthplace, and for the last fifty-six years at Amesbury, a few miles nearer the Atlantic. He thus became in a way an embodiment of local tradition. He felt the strong attachment to his small part of the world that develops in a group whose memories and interests are almost wholly local, and he felt an allegiance to the soil that could respond to Emerson’s “Earth Song”: They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them? As a consequence he described the homely beauties that surrounded him, recorded the traditions of the region, and quite unconsciously, as his rimes often prove, wrote in its dialect (see p. 263). His sense of the reality of his state’s division into counties is best indicated in the stirring roster which he calls in “Massachusetts to Virginia” (ll. 67–80). Two other fundamental conditions prevailed in Essex County, though no more strongly than throughout the entire state. It was a time and place of splendid opportunities. In the colonial centuries, hardly more than completed when Whittier was born, Whittier grew up, then, in simple and unlettered surroundings, comparable to those of Carlyle, much more propitious than those of Lincoln. Like many another boy of the time when “child hygiene” was undreamed of, he probably suffered from insufficient clothing, unsuitable food, and undue exertion on the farm. At any rate his vigor was impaired and he matured, as often has happened, with just the fragility of health that responded to enforced care and resulted in long life. The reading supplied at home was arid,—a few narratives of frontier adventure, a few religious books, “the Bible towering o’er the rest,” and a number of biographies. The Lives of Franklin and of Penn, Of Fox and Scott, all worthy men. The Lives of Pope, of Young, and Prior, Of Milton, Addison and Dyer; Of Doddridge, FÉnelon and Gray, Armstrong, Akenside and Gay. The Life of Burroughs, too, I’ve read, As big a rogue as e’er was made; And Tufts, who, I will be civil, Was worse than an incarnate devil. At eighteen he composed the first bit that was destined to appear in print. It was an imitation of Moore, “The Exile’s Departure,” which was sent without his knowledge to William Lloyd Garrison’s Free Press at Newburyport and published in June, 1826. The young editor, himself only twenty-one, was greatly impressed by the promise of these lines and hunted up the author, coming to the farm just when the embarrassed youth was hunting out a stolen hen’s nest under the barn. Garrison’s interest was of the greatest importance. Whittier was encouraged to write the nearly one hundred pieces of verse which appeared in the Haverhill Gazette in 1827 and 1828, and to earn by shoemaking the money necessary for his first summer term in the new Haverhill Academy in 1827. The little learning he thus secured he converted by school-teaching into enough to take him for another term the next year, and then in 1828, through the continuing influence of Garrison, he was given his first position as an editor, on the American Manufacturer in Boston. He was still a simple country boy, and his published address, “to the young mechanics of New England,” suggests that he had not been encouraged to forget this fact during his first four months in town. He has felt, in common with you all, the injustice of that illiberal feeling, which has been manifested toward mechanics by the wealthy and arrogant of other classes. He has felt his cheeks burn, and his pulse quicken, when witnessing the open, undisguised contempt with He held his post here only from January to August, 1829, when he was summoned home by his father’s illness. Editorship of the Haverhill Gazette followed for the first half of 1830, when he was called to the New England Review in Hartford, Connecticut. This position he occupied with one interruption until the end of 1831, at which time he took his leave of journalism. He was twenty-four years old—in the restless period between youth and real manhood. He had known little but hardship and had come out of it with impaired health. There was little to cheer him in the tragic career of Burns, in the almost desperate enthusiasm of Garrison, or in the cynicism of Byron, to which he had lately become subject. To cap all, he had been “crossed in love.” He could not even have the grim comfort of realizing that he was passing through a youthful phase when he wrote to a friend: Disappointment in a thousand ways has gone over my heart, and left it dust. Yet I still look forward with high anticipations. I have placed the goal of my ambitions high—but with the blessing of God it shall be reached. The world has at last breathed into my bosom a portion of its own bitterness, and I now feel as if I would wrestle manfully in the strife of men. If my life is spared, the world shall know me in a loftier capacity than as a writer of rhymes. There—is not that boasting?—But I have said it with a strong pulse and a swelling heart, and I shall strive to realize it. This temporary abandonment of poetry was after all only an evidence of his regard for it. With all the other young writers of his day, he was hoping for new achievement in American literature and wondering in the back of his mind if he were not to be a contributor to it. At the moment Bryant had turned to journalism the New England group were not yet articulate, Once more Garrison’s influence was to determine him. The general inclination toward humanitarian reform had stirred him to the establishment of the Liberator, and when he declared, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard,” he found a natural ally in Whittier. The great step came in 1833 with the poet’s publication at his own expense of the pamphlet “Justice and Expediency,” with its wider circulation through reprints by sympathizers, with the controversial sequels, and with his share in the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the years to come he said, “I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833, than on the title-page of any book.” It was the deepest test of courage. In the first place it meant that a sensitive young poet who had already felt the injustice of the conservative classes must lay himself open to their contempt and ridicule. It was a bitter time to do this, for never was a day when the miscellaneous inclination to reform offered so great an array of amusing causes and champions. Emerson’s derisive list, “Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers,” is evidence of the degree to which the general idea of reform had been discredited even in the most liberal minds. For there is no doubt that many of the projects were foolish or that the hopes reposed in them as social cure-alls were ridiculous. But the adoption of the abolition cause involved far more than ridicule—nothing less than the completest disapproval of most good citizens. Considered in the large, lawyers and clergymen are conservatives by profession, Between 1831 and 1833 Whittier had become intelligently interested in politics; indeed, had he been a few months older in the autumn of 1832 it is possible that he might have been elected to Congress as a compromise candidate when Caleb Cushing was unable to secure the seat for himself, though strong enough to prevent the choice of an opponent. The young poet had thus learned a good deal about the value of public opinion and about the power of publicity in molding and wielding it. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed he had at his hand a great megaphone that could project his voice to the far districts of the country. As a writer of propagandist verse he was endowed with what in an orator would be a “natural speaking voice.” His convictions were deep and sincere, he had an easy command of simple rhythms, and he was used to thinking and speaking in the language of the people. He was in no danger of falling into As a good journalist and rhetorician he made his issues plain and simple—much simpler in fact than they really were, avoiding embarrassing qualifications. He appealed to the Northerners as a people unanimously opposed to human bondage and not as a half-hearted and divided group. In a generation when the sense of statehood was infinitely stronger than it is now he assumed a high level of altruism in Massachusetts, while he stimulated a sense of state resentment against Virginia or South Carolina. With the memories of the Revolution refreshed by a series of recent semicentennials, he employed the conventional language of protest against tyranny; the antislavery verses resound with vituperative allusions to chains, fetters, yokes, rods, manacles, and gyves, with Scriptural idiom and with scorn for the repudiation of Revolutionary principles of freedom. In the opening lines of “The Crisis” he was skillfully suggestive by his paraphrase of the missionary hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” and in the “Letter from a Missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Kansas to a Distinguished Politician” he turned to contempt the perversion of the Scriptures in defense of slavery. “Go it, old hoss!” they cried, and cursed the niggers— Fulfilling thus the word of prophecy, “Cursed be Canaan.” All this was justifiable, though it frequently was anything but high art. At times, however, the heat of passion led Whittier to write lines for which there was little or no excuse. His disappointment at Webster’s famous “Seventh of March” compromise speech in 1850 led him to the extreme of reproach which was felt by most of the North—an extreme from which he shared the common reaction of later years and for which he made the manly atonement of “The Lost Occasion,” moved “The Waiting,” a poem of 1862, is in the loftier vein of one who does not reËnforce himself through disparagement of his enemies. It is a lament of unfulfilled endeavor in behalf of an ideal cause. As a really great lyric should be, it is both personal and general in its application. It expresses the despondency of the enfeebled and aging poet that he could not join “the shining ones with plumes of snow” in the good fight; and in its reference to “the harder task of standing still” it alludes not only to his resignation at the moment but also to the patient policy which in former years had estranged the extremest abolitionists from him. It also must have been an immediate source of consolation to thousands who have been confronted by urgent duties they could not perform; while at the same time in a broader way it has expressed the faith of “Ulysses” and “Abt Vogler,” of Like Freneau (see pp. 71–81), but to a more marked degree, Whittier was most popular at first for his journalistic, controversial poems, though his most permanent work has nothing to do with either noble or ignoble strife. He followed the example of Burns, who inspired his first literary passion, in writing simple lyrics and narratives of his own countryside. These included many of the legends of Boston, like “Cassandra Southwick,” of Hartford; like “Abraham Davenport,” or of his beloved district north of Boston; like “The Wreck of Rivermouth,” “The Garrison of Cape Ann,” and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” As a rule he was not inclined to tell stories without some clear moral implication, and all too often he expounded this implication, sermon-wise, at the end. Thus he tells with dignity and fine effect the story of the Indian specters of Cape Ann, who were finally driven away by the prayers of the devout garrison after repeated volleys from their musketry had failed. In eighty lines the tale is told; an added stanza calls attention to the fact that there is a moral in the ancient fiction; and two more in a sort of sub-postscript indulge in a final burst of poetical exegesis. “Skipper Ireson,” the best of Whittier’s ballads, is no less moralistic, but is done with more art, for the ethical point is developed within the account instead of being tacked on after it. In poems such as “Hampton Beach,” “The Lakeside,” “The Last Walk in Autumn,” and “At Eventide” Whittier pictures the nature surroundings of his long lifetime; and in a generous succession, from “Memories” of 1841 to “In School-Days,” of nearly thirty years later, he takes his readers along the borderlands of autobiography. PreËminent among his recollections of persons and places is “Snow-Bound.” The snowstorm, which Emerson celebrated as a thing in itself, Whittier adopted as the background for a winter idyl. The “Flemish pictures of old days” which he drew of his Haverhill For summarized criticism of Whittier’s poetry there are few better passages than his own “Proem” to the collected poems of 1849 and the comment in Lowell’s “Fable for Critics,” of the preceding year. Whittier acknowledges the lack in his lines of “mystic beauty, dreamy grace” or of psychological analysis converted into poetry; Lowell confirms the judgment with Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, While, borne with the rush of his metre along, The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, Content with the whirl and delirium of song. Whittier lays his best gifts on the shrine of freedom with an avowal of his love for mankind and his hearty and vehement hatred of all forms of oppression, and Lowell properly qualifies the value of these gifts with the statement that the Quaker’s fervor has sometimes dulled him to the distinction between “simple excitement and pure inspiration.” Whittier deprecates the harshness and rigor of the rhythms which beat “Labor’s hurried time, or Duty’s rugged march,” but Lowell says that at his best the reformer-poet has written unsurpassable lyrics. And both pronounce strictures on his rimes which have been conventionally repeated by most of the later critics who have commented on them at all. Quick, as it fell, from the broken sta’af Dame Barbara snatched the silken sca’af, and he would have concluded with Peace and odda and beauty drawr Reound thy symbol of light and lawr; And evva the stahs above look deown On thy stahs below in Frederick teown! For the ou sounds belong to Essex County, and all the others to Boston and even to hallowed Cambridge. False rimes Whittier wrote in abundance, but by no means all of the apparently bad ones should be condemned at first glance. Until the publication of “Snow-Bound” in 1866 Whittier’s verse, though widely circulated, had brought him in but little money return. For twenty years, he later recalled, he had been given the cold shoulder by editors and publishers; but as the hottest prejudices began to wane they could no longer afford to neglect his manuscripts, for these had in them the leading characteristics of “fireside favorites,” the only sort of poetry that is always certain of the sales to which no publisher is indifferent. In the first place, their form is simple; common words and short sentences are cast in conventional rhythms with frequent rime. They are therefore easy to commit to memory. In content they are easy to understand, not given The last third of Whittier’s life brought him the rewards he had earned and the serenity he deserved. He lived quietly at Amesbury under his own roof or with his cousins at near-by Danvers. He was on friendly terms with the eminent literary men and women of his day. A long protraction of ill-health from boyhood on had developed him into a fragile, gentle old man, a little shy and reticent and to all appearances quite without the fighting powers which he had displayed when there was need for them. If one chooses to recall Whittier from a single portrait, it should be from one taken in his middle rather than in his later life, for the earlier ones are far more rugged. BOOK LISTIndividual Author John Greenleaf Whittier. Works. Riverside Edition. 7 vols. (I–IV, Poetical works; V–VII, Prose.) Standard Library Edition. 9 vols. (Includes content of the Riverside Edition plus the life by S. T. Pickard.) 1892. The best one-volume edition of the poems is the Cambridge Student’s Edition. 1914. His works appeared in book form originally as follows: Legends of New England, 1831; Moll Pitcher, 1832; Justice and Expediency, 1833; Mogg Megone, 1836; Poems written between 1830 and 1838, 1837; Ballads, Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., 1838; Lays of my Home, 1843; The Stranger in Lowell, 1845; Supernaturalism in New England, 1847; Voices of Freedom, 1849; Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, 1850; Songs of Labor, 1850; The Chapel of the Hermits, 1853; Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 1854; The Panorama, 1856; Home Ballads, 1860; In War Time, 1863; National Lyrics, 1865; Snow-Bound, 1866; The Tent on the Beach, 1867; Among the Hills, 1868; Miriam, 1870; The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 1872; Hazel Blossoms, 1874; Centennial Hymn, 1876; The Vision of Echard, 1878; The King’s Missive, 1881; The Bay of Seven Islands, 1883; Saint Gregory’s Guest, 1886; At Sundown, 1892. Bibliography Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 436–451. Biography and Criticism The standard life is by Samuel T. Pickard. 1894. 2 vols. Burton, Richard. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1901. Carpenter, G. R. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1903. (A. M. L. Ser.) Claflin, Mrs. Mary B. Personal Recollections of John Greenleaf Whittier. 1893. Fields, Mrs. Annie. Authors and Friends. 1896. Flower, B. O. Whittier, Prophet, Seer and Man. 1896. Hawkins, C. J. The Mind of Whittier. 1904. Higginson, T. W. Contemporaries. Higginson, T. W. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1902. (E. M. L. Ser.) Kennedy, W. S. John Greenleaf Whittier, his Life, Genius and Writings. 1882. Lawton, W. C. Studies in the New England Poets. 1898. Linton, W. J. Life of John Greenleaf Whittier. 1903. Payne, W. M. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xiii. Pickard, S. T. Whittier Land. 1904. Richardson, C. F. American Literature, Vol. II, chap. vi. Stedman, E. C. Poets of America. 1885. Taylor, Bayard. Critical Essays and Literary Notes. 1880. Underwood, F. H. John Greenleaf Whittier: a Biography. 1884. Wendell, Barrett. Stelligeri and Other Essays. 1893. Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. April 16, 1881. TOPICS AND PROBLEMSRead the poems in Whittier the titles of which suggest local treatment of Essex County life and scenes. Compare these with similar poems in Burns. Read such poems as “First-Day Thoughts,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” “The Garrison of Cape Ann,” “The Waiting,” “The Eternal Goodness,” and “Our Master” for evidences of Whittier’s religion. Read Emerson’s essay on “The New England Reformers,” remembering that Whittier was one of these. Compare the war poetry of Whittier and Freneau. In Whittier’s controversial poetry note the different levels of “Barbara Frietchie,” “Expostulation,” and “The Waiting,” and cite other poems which may fairly be located in these three classes. Read Whittier’s ballads with the comments on page 261 concerning his inclination to expound. Compare and contrast Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” with Burns’s “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Apply the tests for popular fireside poetry to those poems of Whittier’s which you regard as general favorites. |