Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Poetry

TL;DR: In fact, very few Americans cherished Whittier for his antislavery activism before the American Civil War as discussed by the authors, and this concentrated disavowal of his anti-slavery work meant that readers had to ignore most of his poetry in order to celebrate him as a poet.

Abstract: N american poet was more celebrated in the late nineteenth century than John Greenleaf Whittier. In December 1877 his seventieth birthday was nationally recognized and publicly honored by schoolchildren, teachers, reading groups, ministers, fellow authors, politicians, and newspapers and magazines across the country (at the end of the year he allegedly wrote twenty-three hundred replies to well-wishers) (Letters 3: 367). Schools, colleges, streets, ships, towns, mountains, and even a glacier were all named in his honor during the last decades of his life. But this massive memorial effort belied the relatively slender poetic basis of Whittier’s popular poetic celebrity after the American Civil War. Americans of the postbellum era celebrated Whittier for being the poet of everyday life in rural New England, and for writing poems that captured the texture of New England history, supernaturalism, and folklore; very few Americans cherished Whittier for his antislavery activism before the Civil War. This concentrated disavowal of his antislavery work meant that readers had to ignore most of Whittier’s poetry in order to celebrate him as a poet. Whittier’s career had begun in the 1820s; he had become prominent as an antislavery poet associated first with William Lloyd Garrison, then with the political antislavery movement, and eventually with the Republican Party. He published scores of antislavery poems from the 1830s onward, which were printed in broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, books, giftbooks, and anthologies, and which were recited and sung frequently throughout the antebellum decades and during the Civil War.