Selected Poems by John Greenleaf Whittier

Selected Poems Reviews

• 
  Joshua Rigsby

  I have to begin by saying that I am an untrained and generally poor judge of poetry. The genre is mysterious to me, something like capoeira. Is this music? Is it dancing? Is it combat? Hard to tell.
  
  Generally, Whittier's poems felt old-fashioned and academic. Rarely did a glimmer of something like the sublime catch the periphery of some stanza or turn of phrase. There was plenty of plodding, lots of indicative language about Whittier and his time.
  
  But, his time was interesting at times. Perhaps the most important and compelling thing about Whittier and his work was his staunch abolitionism. Whittier was an abolitionist way before it was cool. His most compelling poems resound with his angry battle cry against slavery.
  
  The rest are slow. Or sentimental. Or didactically religious.
  
  Whittier is to be respected for taking such an unpopular moral stand and fighting there, on that hill, until the day was won. The aesthetics might well be left to someone else.
  
  
  http://joshuarigsby.com
• 
  Mahala

  Love this book - so so so much
• 
  Keith

  In 5th grade (circa 1974), my teacher, Mrs. Miller, required us to recite poems. (We also had to identify famous paintings like Blue Boy.) That was her last year teaching before retirement and it was said she started her teaching career in a one-room schoolhouse. (I can neither confirm nor deny that.) My most vivid recollection of her was her paddling of students who couldn’t complete math problems at the blackboard. (Fortunately, I was not one of them, though it did raise the stakes a bit for an already-anxious 11-year-old loser standing at the blackboard.)
  
  Anyway, one of the poems I remember reciting was Barbara Fritchie. (The only others I can recall were Poe’s Eldorado and Holmes’ Old Ironsides.) I’m pretty sure we had to memorize them, though my memory is a bit hazy.
  
  I was young and impressionable, and I fondly remember that poem meaning absolutely nothing to me. It left no impression. At least Eldorado had me wondering what in the world it was about. As an 11-year-old son of a truck driver and a cafeteria worker, poetry was foreign territory for me. A story about an old woman sticking her head out the window to give hell to a bunch of Confederate soldiers did not resonate with me.
  
  Several score years later, I purchased this volume of the selected poems of John Greenleaf Whittier. My 11-year-old self is still wondering why. I point out to him that the book was on sale. Still, he says.
  
  Anyway, Whittier, like his close contemporary Longfellow, has not been treated kindly by the passing of time. And in some respect deservedly so. His unending succession of rhymed tetrameters can become cloying. At best, his writing has a ballad feel, but at worse it tries too hard for literary achievement.
  
  The best poems, by far, are Telling the Bees and Snowbound. Telling the Bees has a rather typical ballad theme of a lover’s death, but it is told in an amazing meter and with a deft use of rhyme. Unlike his other poems which can become monotonous, this has a liveliness and unusual rhythm that energizes the poem. It also includes some beautiful images. Snowbound is a well-known poem that was wildly popular during his life, and deservedly so.
  
  Whittier was actively involved in the issues of his day. He was a famous abolitionist and newspaper publisher (barely surviving a few angry mobs) and he ran for office many times and played an important role in the creation of the Republican party. A man or woman of his time with something important to say could turn to poetry to get his/her message out to a broad audience. The world is different today.
  
  I can’t say I’d recommend this book to the average reader. If you are enthralled by American poetry and its intersection with history, you’ll probably enjoy this book. If your interests lie elsewhere, you may want to skip it. (If you are still curious, his best works are included in most anthologies you can buy.)
  
  Well, maybe the poems in 5th grade did have some effect. They certainly stuck in my memory better than the paintings. The only other painting I recall was by Grandma Moses. And I don’t remember the name of the painting. Just the painter. My 11-year-old self thought that name was weird.
  
  
  A Side Note on the State of Contemporary Poetry:
  Whittier was said to have made $10,000 from the poem Snowbound (almost $145,000 today), selling 20,000 copies when the U.S. population was about 36 million people. Longfellow estimated that he sold 50,000 copies of Hiawatha two years following its publication. The population was about 27 million people at the time.
  
  By comparison, in 2011, the biggest selling book of poetry (Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins) sold 18,400 copies among a U.S. population of 309 million. The book earned the author an estimated $44,000. (
  http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/t...)
  
  
  Second Side Note on Mass Murderers and 19th Century Poets:
  
  John Greenleaf Whitter, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, etc. What do 19th century American poets and contemporary mass murderers have in common? For some reason we know their middle names.
• 
  James Violand

  An under-appreciated poet. Clear imagery, great technique. Should be promoted but we've succumbed to too much free-verse.