![]() The answer to Whittier’s dilemma about his vocation arrived in the mail on March 22, 1833. Poetry hardly paid at all, but he had come to like politics and found that his vociferous public support for Clay had made him a popular man in Massachusetts. He knew that he was at a crossroads in his life and wished to settle finally on a vocation. ![]() Toward the end of 1831 Whittier retired in ill health to Haverhill and spent the winter convalescing. On one occasion he paid five dollars for the privilege of destroying a copy of this rare early volume. Whittier was never entirely comfortable with the Gothic mode, however, and suppressed the book in later life. In February 1831, while at Hartford, Whittier published a collection of tales and poems, Legends of New-England. Although the volume received little attention at the time, it is significant as a pioneering effort to render New England folklore, and in some respects it may be said to anticipate the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. ![]() His editorials, first in The American Manufacturer and later in the Hartford, Connecticut, New England Review, were at least as fierce in their denunciation of the Democrat Andrew Jackson as they were warm in support of the Whig Henry Clay. What he learned from the experience, however, were politics and polemics. Whittier entered journalism for the opportunity to write. This position had been secured for him by William Lloyd Garrison, himself a young newspaper editor who was just then beginning his long career as an abolitionist. He accepted the editorship of The American Manufacturer, a political weekly in Boston. In 1829 Whittier was 22, too frail to be of much help on the farm, too poor to have given himself more than a year at the Haverhill Academy, and already beginning to doubt his abilities as a poet. But his discovery of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who could speak the beauty of the commonplace circumstances of a rural environment, made him wish to be a poet. ![]() A more distinctive part of his background was the rich tradition of folklore in the region tales of witches and ghosts told on winter evenings by the fire exercised the young Whittier’s imagination. 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.
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