Whittier, JOHN GREENLEAF, the sweet American 'Quaker poet' and sturdy abolitionist, was born near Haverhill, Massachusetts, on the 17th December 1807, belonging thus to the same golden decade that gave Emerson and Longfellow to America, Tennyson and the Brownings to England. The son of a poor farmer, who was also shoemaker, young Whittier obtained his formal education only with that struggle which seems so much better to foster genins than the possession of all the advantages, as they are called. While the bodily frame that so well served him till his peaceful decease on the 7th of September of 1892 was developed and hardened by his healthy, if arduous, outdoor life, his observation was roused and quickened, his imagination fired and coloured by the shining pages of nature's volume spread out continually before him. He wandered the New England meadows with the voices of Burns and Wordsworth for ever in his ears. He had, too, a notable schoolmaster in Joseph Coffin, an enthusiastic collector of all local legends and antiquities, thus adding to wild nature the weirder interest of strange, dark, and thrilling human deeds and dread-born superstitions. For his technical education, for better or worse, Whittier was apprenticed to journalism, beginning with contributions to the 'Poet's Corner' and as early as 1829 undertaking the editorship of the American Manufacturer, and in 1830 that of the New England Weekly Review, published at Hartford, Connecticut. His next move was a return to his native town to a similar post on the Haverhill Gazette in 1832, after having published in the previous year Legends of New England and Moll Pitcher. Long before this his poetry had attracted the admiration of William Lloyd Garrison, the champion of 'Abolition,' who rode over from Newburyport to see Whittier when quite a lad, and became his life-long friend. So it fell out that, if Garrison may be called the preacher or prophet, Whittier must be wreathed the poet-laureate of abolition (even though Emerson has touched the subject with more puissant pen). Thenceforward, whether with the bright flashing blade of his noble poetic rhetoric or the sounding quarter-staff of his earnest and manly prose, he fought the long, hot, dangerous battle of emancipation through contempt and defeat to lasting and complete victory. Apart from this strenuous and heroic struggle there is nothing epoch-making in Whittier's life literary or personal. In 1840 he settled in the quiet of Amesbury, a village near his birthplace.
Of Whittier's collected prose works it may be said generally that the historical interest is stronger than the literary; for his prose never rises to the high levels of his poetry, and its main interest lies in the fact that in it we have the work, we may almost say the life-work, of a very earnest and excellent man. The contents of these volumes consist chiefly of articles which have long since served their purpose; and as permanent contributions to literature they lack the masterly style which has in some instances rendered immortal what would otherwise be of but transient interest. Beyond the Atlantic the name abolitionist has never probably obtained the credit that was due to it, mainly because it was hard for an Englishman to realise the high moral and physical courage which the man or the woman must have who passed by that name, not in the slave states merely, but in the North itself, fated though the North was to fight and bleed and conquer in that very cause.
Whittier's claim to immortality lies clearly in his poetry, and there in very small bulk. His anti-slavery poems have for the most part served their purpose, and with some few exceptions, such as the pathetic and spirited 'Slaves of Martinique,' can hardly be of enduring interest. His nature poetry is faithful, fresh, and beautiful, without being quite original, and his ballads of moral heroism, 'Barclay of Ury' and 'Barbara Frietchie,' if a little wanting in pith and sustained force, rank high among poems of that class; but it is when he soars into the spiritual and even mystic spheres, as in 'My Psalm,' that, rising lark-like, his notes come clearest, sweetest, and truest. At lower levels his note is often less certain or even is often ill-sustained. Concerned rather with the feelings and thoughts (neither of them very remarkable) which he desires to express than with poetic form, he lacks the true enthusiasm of the artist for the technique of his work; hence blemishes are often only too patent. Whittier had not, in fact, the quality of originality of the first order nor of that expansiveness which itself becomes the equivalent of originality. No man could be more faithful to his principles, more true to his conscience, and more single in his aspirations towards what was right; no man could cherish through a long life a faith more simple and exalted, or declare with more clearness and insistence his high spiritual message. All these things make a man good and great; they leave him with a lasting influence over kindred minds; but they alone will hardly secure him immortality as a great writer or cause him to take rank among the real thinkers of his age. What will longest remain to us will be the record of a long, pure, and blameless life, and a few of his poems in which, as by a rare and happy fortune, the outbreathings of a sweet and exalted spirit have come to us in a form as exalted and as sweet.
An edition of the poems appeared in 7 vols. in 1888-89; another, containing the posthumous At Sundown, in 1894; the Cambridge edition (1894) was reissued in England in 1899. See Lives by Underwood (1875; new ed. 1883), Kennedy (1882), W. J. Linton (1893), and Pickard (1894).