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 abolish slavery Whittier played an important role as a poet, as a politician, and as a moral force; and yet, though he was among the most ardent of the antebellum reformers, he was saved from the besetting sin of that class--a narrowing and self-consuming zeal--by his equal insistence on tolerance, a quality he had come to cherish all the more through his study of the persecution of his Quaker ancestors. But if Whittier's life was dramatic for the moral, political, and, on occasion, physical conflicts it included, his poetry--the best of it--is of at least equal significance. Whittier was a highly regarded poet during the second half of the nineteenth century, enshrined in the pantheon of "Schoolroom Poets" along with William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
