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John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems

Edited by Brenda Wineapple

“Whittier is an indispensable part of our poetic heritage. . . . As he matured, he sometimes put his strong Quaker beliefs in vital conflict with both the imagistic and hedonistic impulses of their brands of Romanticism. When he created such tension among his passions and responsibilities, the result was a beautiful, valiant pastoralism that one finds impossible to forget.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News The poem for a winter storm: “Snow-Bound” by John Greenleaf Whittier
March 13, 2017

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.”

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.

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Table of Contents

Introduction by Brenda Wineapple

Toussaint l’Ouverture
The Demon of the Study
The Hunters of Men
The Farewell
Massachusetts to Virginia
Song of Slaves in the Desert
The Huskers
Proem
Lines on the Portrait of a Celebrated Publisher
Ichabod!
A Sabbath Scene
The Haschish
Moloch in State Street
First-Day Thoughts
The Kansas Emigrants
Maud Muller
The Fruit-Gift
The Barefoot Boy
Letter
Skipper Ireson’s Ride
The Last Walk in Autumn
The Garrison of Cape Ann
Telling the Bees
My Playmate
The River Path
“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”
The Waiting
Barbara Frietchie
The Vanishers
What the Birds Said
Laus Deo
The Eternal Goodness
Snow-Bound
from The Tent on the Beach
from Among the Hills: Prelude
The Hive at Gettysburg
In School-Days
The Brewing of Soma
The Pressed Gentian
The Witch of Wenham
The Henchman
At Last
Sweet Fern
Burning Drift-Wood
To Oliver Wendell Holmes

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ISBN: 978-1-931082-59-4 214 pages

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