The Fireside Poets were America’s 19th-century literary establishment: the poets who resided in the Parnassus of New England and set the tone for the nation’s literary taste.
Published:
Updated:
By JOSEPH CURL
|
By JAMES BROOKE
|
By DEAN KARAYANIS
|
By JENNIFER DOHERTY
|
By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
|
By HOLLIE McKAY
|
By HOLLIE McKAY
|
By ALEX ZDAN
|We started the Poem of the Day feature in The New York Sun this past February to comment on — and set before readers again — classic works of poetry, in the conviction that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul. Along the way, the Sun has devoted weeks to the likes of Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats, presented weeks of Cowboy Poetry and poems about war, and showcased living authors of rhymed and metered verse.
And yet, somehow, over these past nine months, we seem to have neglected a little the Household Poets — the Schoolroom Poets, as they were sometimes called, or the Fireside Poets. These were America’s 19th-century literary establishment: the poets who resided in the Parnassus of New England and set the tone for the nation’s literary taste. Their poems were in every schoolbook, every anthology, every fine-press edition of America’s proudly declared native work. Everyone knew them and everyone recited them. The 20th-century turn against Victorian poetry was essentially a turn against them.
The Poem of the Day has featured a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) remains a presence, simply because he’s Longfellow and inescapable. But where are the rest of the old establishment? Where are the other poets read by the fireside? Where are the likes of William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892), or James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)?
The time has come to address some of that absence, with John Greenleaf Whittier’s most famous poem, the 1866 “Snow-Bound.” Almost 800 lines long, the poem looks back in memory at the New England farmhouse in which the poet grew up, as the narrator describes being trapped by snow for a December week.
The poem was an immediate success, selling thousands of copies. Part of that came from the nostalgic tone, capturing a rural past much of America could feel fading. But part came as well from the moral argument of the poem — the claim that what keeps us from one another’s throats, cramped in small spaces, is reading aloud and telling stories: the sociality of narrative art overcoming cabin fever (as instanced in the poem itself, with its easy-reading tetrameter couplets). But the success of “Snow-Bound” also came from the sharply visual descriptions of snow and life in New England’s December landscape, as the following extract from the beginning of the poem show.
Already have a subscription? Sign in to continue reading
Cancel anytime
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
