: John Greenleaf Whittier: A sketch of his life with selected poems by Perry Bliss Whittier John Greenleaf - Poets American 19th century Biography; American poetry 19th century; Whittier John Greenleaf 1807-1892

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He was led, no doubt,--as in the more momentous crisis of 1833, when he obeyed Garrison's call and turned Abolitionist,--by an instinct deeper than any conscious analysis of his powers. He knew that he had what he called a "knack of rhyming," and he had learned from Burns to find material for poetry all about him. Yet he possessed at this time but a scanty equipment for the long road which a poet must travel. His physical endowment was impoverished. That full-blooded life of the senses, which taught Burns and Goethe at fourteen such secrets of human rapture and dismay, was impossible for the Quaker stripling. He was color-blind. His ear barely recognized a tune. The bodily sensations of odor, taste, and touch are scarcely to be felt in his poetry. He was indeed "no Greek," as Whitman said of him long afterward; and at the outset of his career, as at its close, he cared but little for literature as an art. To conceive of any of the arts as a religion, or as an embodiment, for sense perception, of the highest potencies of the human spirit, would have seemed almost blasphemous to this follower of the "inward light." He wrote to Lucy Hooper that a long poem, "unless consecrated to the sacred interests of religion and humanity, would be a criminal waste of life." Parthenon and Pantheon were in his eyes less significant and memorable than Pennsylvania Hall, the Abolitionist headquarters in Philadelphia. In an editorial in "The Freeman" in 1838, prefacing a reprint of "A Psalm of Life," which had just been published in the New York "Knickerbocker," Whittier declared: "It is very seldom that we find an article of poetry so full of excellent philosophy and COMMON SENSE as the following. We know not who the author may be, but he or she is no common man or woman. These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live--the moral steam enginery of an age of action."

One who could utter this amazing verdict upon the "Psalm of Life" certainly seems less fitted for poetry than for journalism and politics: and indeed Whittier's aptitude for affairs, even at twenty-one, was extraordinary. His political editorials for the "Manufacturer"--a Clay journal which advocated a protective tariff--were skilfully written from the first. Subsequent editorial engagements in Haverhill, Hartford, and Philadelphia, although rendered brief by his wretched health, nevertheless widened his acquaintance and increased his self-confidence. His judgment was canny. His knowledge of local conditions, at first in his native town and county, and afterward throughout New England and the Eastern States, was singularly exact. He seemed to perceive, as by some actual visualization, how people were thinking and feeling in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other communities which he had observed at first hand; and he employed a correspondingly accurate and as it were topographical imagination when he wrote of affairs in Kansas, Paris, or Italy.

This glimpse at the later revelations of his character is essential to an understanding of the spiritual crisis which confronted him in 1833, when he was only twenty-six. He loved power, and had already exercised it in the congenial field of politics. The road to preferment lay that way. It is true that he had continued to compose abundantly, both in prose and in verse. His writings were favorably noticed. Yet he saw no career for himself as a man of letters. "I have done with poetry and literature," he wrote to a friend in 1832. Repeated disappointments in love had darkened his spirit. The death of his father had forced him back to the old farm to support his mother and sisters. Black care sat very close behind him. Discouraged, lonely, with ambitions ungratified and great powers of which he was but half aware, he paused, like some knight who had lost his way in an enchanted forest. Then blew the clear unmistakable trumpet call which broke the spell and summoned him to action. Although an anti-slavery man by native instinct, Whittier had never given his adherence to the sect of Abolitionists. Now came a letter from Garrison : "My brother, there are upwards of two million of our countrymen who are doomed to the most horrible servitude which ever cursed our race and blackened the page of history. There are one hundred thousand of their offspring kidnapped annually from their birth. The southern portion of our country is going down to destruction, physically and morally, with a swift descent, carrying other portions with her. This, then, is a time for the philanthropist--any friend of his country, to put forth his energies, in order to let the oppressed go free, and sustain the republic. The cause is worthy of Gabriel--yea, the God of hosts places himself at its head. Whittier, enlist! Your talents, zeal, influence--all are needed."

The spirit of Burns, years before, had whispered to the boy that he, too, had the poet-soul, yet facile versifying was all that had seemed to come of it, and the young man had turned to politics. Now the living voice of Garrison called him away from partisan ambitions to enlist in a doubtful and perilous measure of moral reform. He obeyed, and--so strange are the mysteries of personality--found in that new service to humanity not only the inspiration which made him a genuine poet, but the popular recognition which set the seal upon his fame.

The immediate cost of obedience to his conscience was heavy. The generation of Americans born since the Civil War look back upon the Abolitionists as victors after thirty years of agitation, as the dictators of national policy. Their statues are in public places. Their theories have prevailed. But in the early thirties they suffered such ostracism and even martyrdom as only a few historical students now realize. Churches, colleges, and courts were against them, for reasons which were adequate enough. They were dangerous members of society. To-day we endeavor to exclude Anarchists from American soil; the leading Abolitionists, like the Russian Revolutionists of the present hour, preached Anarchy in the name of Humanity. Whittier, trained to quietism, non-resistance, and respect for law, and skilled as he had become in feeling the pulse of public opinion, knew perfectly well what company he was henceforth to keep. To be an active Abolitionist was to join the outcasts.

His first act of allegiance was to write and publish at his own expense a pamphlet entitled "Justice and Expediency," which pleaded for immediate emancipation by peaceful means. In December, 1833, he was a delegate from Massachusetts at the founding in Philadelphia of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Whittier was the youngest member. Thirty years later he wrote to Garrison, who had been his companion upon that memorable journey: "I am not insensible to literary reputation. I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will of my fellow-men; but 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." No words could better illustrate his devotion to the cause of the slave. Yet he did not surrender his right of private judgment as to the best means to be employed. Garrison lost patience, ere long, with Whittier's willingness to further the cause by compromise and concession, and the friends parted, to come together again in later years. The movement for emancipation needed both men and both methods; but Whittier's method--less heroic than Garrison's, less intolerant than Sumner's, less virulent than that of Wendell Phillips--was like Abraham Lincoln's in its patience, shrewdness, and sympathy.

Whittier faced hostile mobs with perfect courage, and with a touch of the humor which is rarely revealed in his writings. When the Philadelphia rioters looted and burned Pennsylvania Hall, he disguised himself in a wig and long white overcoat, mingled with the mob, and saved his own editorial papers. He brought not only courage and finesse, but high journalistic skill, to the service of the Abolitionists. His pamphlets, his editorials in the "Freeman," "Middlesex Standard," "National Era," and other newspapers, were trenchant, caustic, and far-sighted. Invalidism and the care of his mother's family kept him almost constantly at Amesbury, whither he had removed after the sale of his birthplace in 1836. But Whittier's was no home-keeping mind, and there is scarcely a political event of importance, either in this country or abroad, which is not reflected in his prose and verse produced during the thirty years ending with the close of the Civil War.

Yet his chief function during the long anti-slavery struggle was that of chartered poet to the cause. No sooner had he abandoned his dream of personal advancement than the Byronic melancholy, the weak imitations of Scott, and the echoes of Mrs. Felicia Hemans disappear from his verse. He was studying the prose of Milton and Burke, those organ-voices of English liberty. From Burns and Byron he now caught only the passion for justice and the common rights of all. He forgot himself. He forgot, for the time being, those pleasant themes of New England legend and history, which earlier and later touched his meditative fancy. The cause of negro emancipation in America--to his mind only one phase of the struggle for a wider human freedom everywhere--stirred and deepened his whole nature. There is scarcely a type of political and social verse which is not represented in his work during this period. He wrote personal lyrics in praise of living leaders, and mournful salutes to the dead; hymns to be sung in churches, and campaign songs for the town hall. The touching lines to "Randolph of Roanoke" are a knightly tribute to an opponent. The generous and noble "Lost Occasion" was written after Webster's death to supplement, rather than to retract, the terrific "Ichabod" addressed to Webster after his defence of the Fugitive Slave Law. Not since Burns had any poet dared pillory the clergy in such derisive and indignant strains as marked "Clerical Oppressors," "The Pastoral Letter," and "A Sabbath Scene." The selfishness of commercialism, and its "paltry pedler cries" which exalt "banks" and "tariffs" above the man, have never been arraigned more powerfully than in "The Pine-Tree" and "Moloch in State Street." Such poems are class and party verse of the purest type.

Whittier's direct contact with the soil and his intense interest in localities made him also an unequalled interpreter of sectional feeling. "Massachusetts to Virginia" is perhaps the finest example of this sort of political verse, but he wrote many similar poems hardly less striking; and such was the flexibility of Whittier's imagination when inspired by the common cause that he expressed not only the mood of the New England but also of the Middle States, and of that "Wild West," as he called it, which was so soon to combine with his "roused North." Much of this political poetry was, in the nature of the case, only a sort of rhymed oratory, scarcely differing, save in rhetorical and metrical structure, from the speeches of Beecher and Wendell Phillips. Sometimes it was rhymed journalism, of the kind which Greeley was using in his sturdy iterative editorials. Much of it, no doubt, has already met the oblivion which attends most pamphlets or stanzas "for the times." Harshness of tone, over-severity in judgment of men and measures, diffuseness of style, a faulty ear for rhymes, are frequently in evidence. Yet these blemishes scarcely affected the immediate value of Whittier's verse for controversial purposes. Its faults of taste and form were rightly forgotten in its communicative energy of emotion, its lambent scorn of evil things, its prophet-like exaltation. Long before armed conflict ended the debate, Whittier's poetry had won the attention not only of his section, but of the entire North, and as the conflict proceeded his verse sounded more and more clearly that national note which had been the burden of the great and maligned Webster's speeches for union. Only now it was to be a union redeemed. We must be "first pure, then peaceable," the Quaker poet had maintained, and the fine close of his ballad "Barbara Frietchie," like his "Laus Deo" which "sang itself" in church while the bells were ringing to celebrate the passing of slavery, is echoed to-day in the hearts of true Americans everywhere.

"The rigor of a frozen clime, The harshness of an untaught ear, The jarring words of one whose rhyme Beat often Labor's hurried time, Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife, are here."

He does not regret his choice, but there is some yearning over the lost Arcady. In the enforced leisure of his frequent invalidism Whittier read very widely, and legend and dreamy fancy alternate in his verse with satirical invective and eloquent humanitarianism. The tragic "Ichabod" and the mordant irony of "A Sabbath Scene" are followed by the charming lines "To My Old Schoolmaster." The poem on Burns, so fresh with "the dews of boyhood's morning," and the ballad of "Maud Muller," where the pathos of our human "might have been" is expressed with such artless adequacy, date from the thrilling year of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. The Kansas emigrants were actually singing

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