John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-slavery writings, as well as his 1866 book Snow-Bound.
John Greenleaf Whittier, 1885
Oil on canvas painting of John Greenleaf Whittier by Robert Peckham (artist) (1833). Housed at the John Greenleaf Whittier House.
Broadside publication of Whittier's Our Countrymen in Chains
Daguerreotype of John Greenleaf Whittier, c. 1855–60
The fireside poets – also known as the schoolroom or household poets – were a group of 19th-century American poets associated with New England. These poets were very popular among readers and critics both in the United States and overseas. Their domestic themes and messages of morality presented in conventional poetic forms deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity at the beginning of the 20th century.
1913 image featuring portraits representing four of the fireside poets: Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier
The addition of Sidney Lanier, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe to the frontispiece of Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology in 1900 indicated the beginning of a canonical shift away from the fireside poets.
Bryant
Holmes
