John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #10) - Hardcover

Whittier, John Greenleaf

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931082596 ISBN 13: 9781931082594

Publisher: Library of America, 2004

Synopsis

A beloved figure in his own era——a household name for such poems as “Barbara Frietchie” and “The Barefoot Boy”—John Greenleaf Whittier remains an emotionally honest, powerfully reflective voice. A Quaker deeply involved in the struggle against slavery (he was harassed by mobs more than once) he enlisted his poetry in the abolitionist cause with such powerful works as “The Hunters of Men,” “Song of Slaves in the Desert,” and “Ichabod!”, his mournful attack on Daniel Webster’s betrayal of the anti-slavery cause.

Whittier’s narrative gift is evident in such perennially popular poems as “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” and the Civil War legend “Barbara Frietchie,” while in his masterpiece “Snow-Bound” he created a vivid, flavorful portrait of the country life he knew as a child in New England. “His diction is easy, his detail rich and unassuming, his emotion deep,” writes editor Brenda Wineapple. “And the shale of his New England landscape reaches outward, promising not relief from pain but a glimpse of a better, larger world.”

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

About this title

About the Author:

Brenda Wineapple’s books include Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848–1877, Hawthorne: A Life, and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a 2014 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

From The Washington Post:

John Greenleaf Whittier's Selected Poems, edited by Brenda Wineapple, will come as a revelation to anyone who was force-fed Whittier in school and never turned back to him. I had an eighth-grade teacher who recited "Snow-bound" with such dull zeal that I decided it was the most boring poem in American literature. Wineapple had a similar experience. "Later I realized I had been too young for the poem," she writes in a marvelous introduction, "and now I suspect that all the schoolchildren subjected to Whittier's assurances are themselves too callow to understand, never mind care, how memory fends off the mindlessness of winter." We had no idea Whittier was summoning a lost rural world against encroaching blankness, a world whiting out, "coldness visible."

I wish someone had pointed out to us that the 19th-century New England poet of place was also a fiery abolitionist and socially engaged protest poet. He was a Quaker with a wide reach and a deep social conscience. "Although I am a Quaker by birthright and sincere convictions," he said, "I am no sectarian in the strict sense of the term. My sympathies are with the Broad Church of Humanity."

Whittier is well-known as the popular Yankee storyteller of "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "Barbara Frietchie," and "Telling the Bees," but I wish more readers also knew his powerful abolitionist poems. He despised slavery, the scourge of our country ("I hate slavery in all its forms, degrees and influences," he wrote), and was threatened by mobs more than a few times. His best antislavery poems include the sardonic ballad "The Hunters of Men," "Songs of Slaves in the Desert" and "Ichabod!," a mournful lament and furious attack on Daniel Webster for supporting the Compromise of 1850, which included a new Fugitive Slave Law. Ichabod means "inglorious" in Hebrew, and Whittier applies it to Webster for betraying the anti-slavery cause.

Ichabod!

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

Forevermore!

Revile him not -- the Tempter hath

A snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit his fall!

Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage,

When he who might

Have lighted up and led his age,

Falls back in night.

Scorn! Would the angels laugh, to mark

A bright soul driven,

Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,

From hope and heaven!

Let not the land, once proud of him,

Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,

Dishonored brow.

But let its humbled sons, instead,

From sea to lake,

A long lament, as for the dead,

In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honored, nought

Save power remains --

A fallen angel's pride of thought,

Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes

The soul has fled:

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!

By Edward Hirsch

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1931082596
• ISBN 13: 9781931082594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230