SOURCE: "Whittier," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, Winter, 1971, pp. 98-133.

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.

When Whittier, at the age of twenty-six, came to knock "Pegasus on the head", the creature he laid low was, indeed, not much better than the tanner's superannuated donkey. In giving up his poetry he gave up very little. Looking back on the work he had done up to that time, we can see little achievement and less promise of growth. He had the knack, as he put it in "The Nervous Man", for making rhymes "as mechanically as a mason piles one brick above another", but nothing that he wrote had the inwardness, the organic quality, of poetry...