4 - John Greenleaf Whittier

Summary

When John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92) published his first poem in 1826, Carlos Wilcox and John Brainard were still alive; when he published his last poem in 1892, Robert Frost was in high school and Ezra Pound was seven years old. No other poet of the American nineteenth century spans such distances or wrote in such varied styles. Whittier was a lover of New England landscape and traditional lore; he was a political activist, whose poems were meant to awaken consciences; he was an exuberant satirist; he was a Quaker whose verse spoke of forbearance and faith. For more than thirty years he was involved in the struggle against slavery, as an active member of both local and national anti-slavery parties. The events of the day kept him well supplied with topics for verse – sometimes the cruelties of slaveholders, more often the collusion of the Northern businessmen with the anti-abolition mobs who pelted him and his friends with rotten eggs, sticks, and light missiles when they tried to hold public meetings to discuss slavery. He could write about the rotten eggs with amusement, but not about the menace to civil liberties offered by the 1835 pro-slavery meeting in Boston's Faneuil Hall, where (to use Whittier's words) “a demand was made for the suppression of free speech, lest it should endanger the foundations of commercial society,” or by Governor Edward Everett's inaugural message in 1836, which urged citizens to abstain from any discussion of slavery. This address drew from Whittier an outraged question addressed to Everett in the Haverhill Gazette: “Is this the advice of a republican magistrate to a community of freemen?” Or, as he put it in “Stanzas for the Times” (1835), must the Yankee farmer “be told, beside his plough, / What he must speak, and when, and how?”