The New England tradition was contested throughout the United States, its meanings were never monolithic, and authors like John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell are more interesting than literary history has remembered them to be. Whittier's relation to the antislavery movement was entirely print-mediated, and in the vexed political climate of the 1830s his publications made him notorious. Whitman Bennett has described Whittier's antislavery newspaper poems as a very special brand. The dialectical distinction between national and natural literature characterizes Lowell's stance on literary value: literature becomes national as it becomes natural, by growing from a global tradition. The decline of Lowell's productivity after the Civil War has been noted, but the Commemoration Ode really commemorates the passing of the kind of public verse he had championed, which once shaped the social order, but which will have a less important place in the new, postbellum world.

Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century was lousy with poets. At the apex of respectable high cultural ambitions, the Atlantic Monthly, under the editorship of James Russell Lowell and with the nods of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes among other worthies, was publishing poetry vigorously. At some point in the 1860s, each poet separately composed a self-consciously major poem on the summer chorus of the crickets. The other voices of mid-nineteenth-century American poetry could scarcely be more other than Thomas Hill's transcription of Martian verse. The journalistic branch of American poetry was closely related to other modes of gaining access to authorship: Walt Whitman began his authorial career in social movement writing, with a temperance novel, and John Greenleaf Whittier moved through stints as a school teacher and a newspaper editor before becoming one of the major poets of nineteenth-century social movements.