John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) was an American poet whose humanitarianism and great popular appeal established him as an important 19th-century figure. John Greenleaf Whittier was born on a farm near Haverhill, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1807, of poor...

John Greenleaf Whittier's importance to America's cultural life, and the claim he makes on our remembrance, is at least twofold. In the first place his life was and remains a model of dedication to the twin principles of freedom and tolerance. In the...

Although John Greenleaf Whittier's reputation as a poet declined drastically in the twentieth century, his career is of continuing interest as an example of the writer functioning as a deeply committed reform activist. In the thirty-year struggle to...

John Greenleaf Whittier's Selected Poems, edited by Brenda Wineapple, will come as a revelation to anyone who was force-fed Whittier in school and never turned back to him. I had an eighth- grade teacher who recited "Snow-bound" with such dull zeal that I decided...

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA recently issued a volume of the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier. This is fitting. While he will never be placed in the first rank of poets and even his admirers admit that he authored much dismissible verse, Whittier, who...

Poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel All the King's Men. In the following excerpt, he relates Whitter's maturation as a poet to his work as a journalist and political propagandist.

In the following excerpt, the author contrasts the backgrounds and biases of various Whittier critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the following excerpt, Rocks relates Whittier's poem Snow-Bound to nineteenth-century debates on home and family.