He knew that he had written too much, and that much of what he had written for the abolitionist movement had been hastily composed and for ends that were purely political. Nevertheless, there is in his collected poetry a core of excellent work, at the head of which stands his masterpiece, "Snow-Bound," a lovingly imaginative recreation of the good life in rural New England. This work, together with "Telling the Bees," "Ichabod," "Massachusetts to Virginia," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "The Double-Headed Snake of Newbury," and a dozen or so others, suggests not only the New England source of Whittier's Finest achievements but also the appeal that folk material had for his imagination.
Whittier's youth-indeed, his whole life-was deeply rooted in the values, history, and traditions of rural Essex County, Massachusetts. Born in a farmhouse that his great-great-grandfather had built in the seventeenth century, Whittier grew up in a poor but respectable household characterized by hard work, Quaker piety, and warm family affection. The region was rich with folklore; tales of witches and ghosts told on winter evenings by the fire exercised the young Whittier's imagination, but it was his discovery of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, who could speak the beauty of the commonplace circumstances of a rural environment, that made him wish to be a poet.
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