ABSTRACT
Poet, editor, essayist, and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier was a dedicated Quaker known for his nostalgic poems and popular hymns and for his contributions to the nineteenth-century antislavery movement. He was a member of the Fireside Poets, a group of New Englanders—also including William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry David Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—whose largely conventional verse on patriotic themes, domestic life, and picturesque scenery made them as popular as any poets in Britain. Whittier's reputation lies primarily on such poems as the idyllic Vermont narrative “Snow-Bound” (1866) and the patriotic Civil War ballad “Barbara Fritchie” (1863) and such hymns as “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” (from his 1872 poem “The Brewing of Soma”).
