SOURCE: "The Growth of Whittier's Mind—Three Phases," in Emerson Society Quarterly, Vol. 50, 1968, First Quarter, pp. 119-26.

In the following excerpt, Clark traces the development of Whittier's themes from an early taste for "localistic sensationalism" through his championship of abolition to a broad concern for human welfare.

After one has analyzed Whittier's individual poems or fragments of his work, it is well to view him briefly in complete profile as a kind of man against the sky. Broadly speaking, he seems to have had three successive centers of emphasis—I say emphasis because there are of course minor exceptions which do not seriously invalidate this interpretation.

Up to 1833 Whittier was primarily concerned with the literary aspects of the sensational, the lurid, or the colorfully superstitious, usually approached from a localistic angle. The type is represented in "The Demon's Cave" (1831) in which he says there is in this actual...