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. Whittier, in particular, was his grateful follower, in his strong attachment to rural life and patterns of thought, his rough, uncomplicated emotions and his decent simplicity. Whittier was very much a committed poet, devoting much of his life to anti-slavery campaigning, sitting in the Massachusetts legislature, editing newspapers and founding the Liberty party. I like editor-poets. When the head-printer tells them there is a ‘hole’ in the editorial copy, they can write a poem to fill it, as Kipling was to do, regularly, a few decades later in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. Not that I particularly like Whittier’s political verse, except of course ‘Ichabod’, his denunciation of Daniel Webster’s decision to support the 1850 compromise on slavery:

Revile him not, the Tempter hath

A snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit his fall!

This poem is almost the exact American equivalent of Browning’s attack on Words-worth, ‘The Lost Leader’, and probably just as unfair.