And Another Thing

Wednesday, 18th February 2009

A time for American poets to speak out in warning?

During the Arctic weather I re-read that finest of winter pastorals, ‘Snowbound’ by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). It gripped me, as it always does, by its combination of intense realism about the present and its imaginative sympathy for the past. Whittier describes heavy snow sealing off a household in the early 19th century, about the time Wordsworth first moved to Rydal Mount. He uses the situation to bring back to life the faces and characters of all his family and friends, now dead, who once sat around the blazing log fire in the snowbound wooden house. It is a powerful work, by no means short — around 770 lines — and many would rank it the most perfect poem ever produced by an American.

Oddly enough, in all the tributes recently paid to Robert Burns, on the 200th anniversary of his death, none I saw mentioned his influence in the emerging literature of America, which was profound. Whittier, in particular, was his grateful follower, in his strong attachment to rural life and patterns of thought, his rough, uncomplicated emotions and his decent simplicity. Whittier was very much a committed poet, devoting much of his life to anti-slavery campaigning, sitting in the Massachusetts legislature, editing newspapers and founding the Liberty party. I like editor-poets. When the head-printer tells them there is a ‘hole’ in the editorial copy, they can write a poem to fill it, as Kipling was to do, regularly, a few decades later in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. Not that I particularly like Whittier’s political verse, except of course ‘Ichabod’, his denunciation of Daniel Webster’s decision to support the 1850 compromise on slavery:

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Fergus Pickering

February 21st, 2009 5:23pm Report this comment

Thank you for that. I am particularly glad you like Longfellow and Whittier. Not many Americans do, or not of they are literary professionals, as it were.

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