And Another Thing | 21 February 2009

During the Arctic weather I re-read that finest of winter pastorals, ‘Snowbound’ by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). It gripped me, as it always does, by its combination of intense realism about the present and its imaginative sympathy for the past. Whittier describes heavy snow sealing off a household in the early 19th century, about the time Wordsworth first moved to Rydal Mount. He uses the situation to bring back to life the faces and characters of all his family and friends, now dead, who once sat around the blazing log fire in the snowbound wooden house. It is a powerful work, by no means short — around 770 lines — and many would rank it the most perfect poem ever produced by an American.

Oddly enough, in all the tributes recently paid to Robert Burns, on the 200th anniversary of his death, none I saw mentioned his influence in the emerging literature of America, which was profound.