John Greenleaf Whittier

(1807-1892)

Whittier's poetic subjects and many of the qualities of his verse led him to be included in the group known as the Fireside Poets. But unlike Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, who were raised in privilege and enjoyed a distinguished education, Whittier was born into a poor Quaker family and had little formal schooling. He started to write poetry as an adolescent, heavily influenced by the popular Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796).

In 1831, he published his first book, Legends of New-England in Prose and Verse, a collection of pieces on local Massachusetts history.

In 1835, Whittier was elected to the state legislature. Although much of Whittier's writing during this period was overtly political, he also produced a long work of fiction on the Salem, witch trials and several books of nature poetry. "Barbara Frietchie," perhaps Whittier's best-known ballad, appeared in a collection called In War Time and Other Poems, published in 1864.

After the Civil War, Whittier turned again to nature for many of his subjects. In 1866, he completed Snow-Bound, a long poem (759 lines) which many critics consider his masterpiece and which made Whittier famous. Advancing age did not reduce his output; until he was well into his eighties; Whittier continued to publish poetry on homely incidents from rural life, episodes from Colonial history, and the humanitarian ideals of justice, religious faith, and tolerance. As much as his poetry, his humane convictions and moral example left a mark for good on his time.

In Snow-Bound, Whittier looks back fondly on the life he spent as a boy in the farmhouse in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where his family had lived since 1688. Whittier remembers what we would call "an extended family," a gathering under one roof of eight to nine related people of varying ages, along with the male boarder who taught school nearby. Imprisoned by the storm, these people had to live for days without news of the outside world. Their rooms were dimly lighted by candles, or perhaps by lamps that burned the whale oil called macassar. Their food was stored in crocks and barrels and briny vats and kept in the cellar. Water came from a pump in the kitchen or a well in the yard. The bath-room as we know it today did not exist. For heat and cooking, they burned wood. Life, in a word, was hard. But like many people, Whittier found in his past a kind of benediction.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

(1809-1894)

One of the most dynamic men of his time, Oliver Wendell Holmes pursued two careers simultaneously—medicine and literature—and he made lasting contributions to each.

One of the founders of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Holmes gained his national reputation from a series of chatty, urbane, and sometimes irreverently witty essays. These were eventually collected under the title The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), in which the leading character (recognizable to most readers as the author himself) presided over the spirited table-talk at an imaginary Boston boarding house. Holmes's poetry was, for the most part, light and even comic. It commented on the social and intellectual shortcomings of his contemporaries, particularly those who aspired to higher forms of verse than he himself dared, to write. But, on the evidence of his serious poems such as "The Chambered Nautilus," Holmes had earned the right to judge, not from an envious spirit but in the confidence of an equal talent.