Fireside Poets

Introduction

In the nineteenth century, American families would gather around the fireside to listen as a family member read. Among the works selected were the poems of several American poets who had gained critical respectability and popularity that rivaled that of their British counterparts. The poems of these New England poets—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Cullen Bryant—were included in textbooks, and their portraits often adorned schoolroom walls. Therefore, this group is called Fireside or Schoolroom Poets.

The Fireside poets shared several characteristics. From youth, they displayed language skills. Although their families envisioned legal careers for them, they became magazine editors and contributors, preachers, or college professors. Their interests were literature and education, which for them were closely related. Most wrote about American politics and New England landscapes. They publicly opposed slavery. Some, such as Longfellow, presented Native Americans sympathetically. Generally, their poems were highly didactic, emphasizing conventional nineteenth-century values—duty, honor, personal responsibility, and hard work. A staple of textbooks, these poems were memorized by generations of schoolchildren.

Several Fireside poets translated the classics, providing many students with an introduction to classical mythology and Renaissance literature. These poets used conventional meter and primarily end rhyme. Most eventually developed friendships with contemporary English poets. Modern critics fault the Fireside poets for their failure to experiment with innovative metrical forms, their conventional ideas, and their excessive sentimentality. Still, the Fireside poets regarded themselves as the voice of the average American. Literary historians have examined the Fireside poets primarily as nineteenth-century cultural icons.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The most consistently popular Fireside poet is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), the only American poet with a bust in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. On his final visit to England (1868-1869), he received honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and was also received by Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales.

When Longfellow was born in the early 1800s, few people believed that an American writer could be successful because neither English nor American critics and readers respected American writers. Stephen Longfellow wanted his son to follow his example and become a successful lawyer. However, Longfellow’s mother, Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow, a writer, encouraged her son’s sensitive side.

Reluctant to study law, Longfellow explored other careers. His first choice was writing; he published several poems in local gazettes but quickly realized that an academic career offered financial security unavailable to poets or journalists. After he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1829, the trustees offered him a professorship of modern languages—provided he traveled to Europe and became fluent in Romance languages. Longfellow decided to add proficiency in German.

Longfellow modernized foreign language instruction at Bowdoin, replacing rote exercises with conversational approaches. Not completely happy there, he eagerly accepted an offer to become Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University in 1837. He first traveled to Europe, this time to acquaint himself with Scandinavian languages and literature, for which he discovered a real affinity. On each trip, Longfellow developed personal friendships with writers.

Longfellow had a gift for intellectual friendships. After retirement from Harvard in 1854, he maintained contact with his academic colleagues and fellow poets. In 1855, a group of American writers calling themselves the Saturday Club began meeting monthly. In 1857, Longfellow joined other Atlantic Monthly contributors in founding the Atlantic Club.

Longfellow’s popularity was established with the 1847 publication of Evangeline, a long poem in dactylic hexameter. Although it seems excessively sentimental to most twenty-first-century readers, this narrative poem about the separation of lovers when the Acadians were exiled to Louisiana immediately appealed to readers in the United States and Europe and retained its popularity well into the twentieth century. The Song of Hiawatha (1855) was almost as popular, which Longfellow intended as the Native American equivalent of Scandinavian epics. Portrayed as honorable and noble, Hiawatha was doomed to defeat by manifest destiny. Longfellow focused on New England history in The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems (1858), the source of the familiar warning that John Alden speaks for himself. In Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), Longfellow imitated the narrative structure of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620). Several poems dealt with New England subjects, but most reflected his European travels. In The New England Tragedies (1968), Longfellow compared the careers of rebellious colonial figures John Endicott and Giles Corey. Longfellow’s The Divine Tragedy (1971), his meditation on the passion of Christ, confused some readers, and his later volumes did not sell as well as earlier ones had. Nevertheless, Longfellow remained the quintessentially American poet, respected by fellow poets such as Walt Whitman and critics such as Edgar Allan Poe.

Although Longfellow experienced his share of personal tragedy, his poems generally dealt with historical events or sentimental portraits of family life (as in the popular “The Children’s Hour”) and were rarely confessional. One exception is the posthumously published “The Cross of Snow,” which chronicled his grief at the death of his second wife, Frances Appleton. Longfellow’s solace was his work. When his first wife, Mary Potter, suffered a miscarriage and died, he immersed himself in the study of German literature. When his second wife died in a fire, he turned to his blank-verse translation of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). While translating this epic, Longfellow met weekly with the Dante Club, and other poets worked on their translations. Again, Longfellow’s metrical and linguistic skills served him well; his translation of Dante is still considered one of the best.

Longfellow and his second wife, Frances, were the parents of six children (Charles, Ernest, Fanny, Alice, Edith, and Anne Allegra). When Longfellow died of phlebitis a few days after his seventy-fifth birthday, he left them an estate of $356,320—a remarkable sum for a nineteenth-century writer. His poems had been translated into twenty-four languages, and he had proven one could become a successful American writer.

James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) never achieved the general popularity of his friend Longfellow. Lowell is remembered less for his poetry than for his essays, his diplomatic service, and his founding editorship of The Atlantic Monthly.

Lowell was the son of the Reverend Charles Russell Lowell and Harriet Brackett Spence, descendants of prominent New England families. Lowell graduated from Harvard College in 1838 and Harvard Law School in 1840 but quickly decided on a literary career. Influenced by Maria White (whom he married in 1844), Lowell published a poetry collection, A Year’s Life (1841), which was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Reviewers pointed out the flaws plaguing Lowell throughout his career: technical infelicities, metrical irregularities, extreme didacticism, and obscure allusions.

In 1848, Lowell published the three works for which he is most remembered: The Biglow Papers, A Fable for Critics, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. An instant popular success, The Biglow Papers uses a prose framework to present dialect verses of Yankee farmer Hosea Biglow, who opposes the Mexican War. The Biglow Papers remained so popular that Lowell issued The Biglow Papers: Second Series (1867), this time dealing with the American Civil War. A Fable for Critics, published anonymously, is a humorous appraisal of Longfellow’s literary contemporaries. Lowell’s critical acumen, as evidenced in this work, is still much admired. Less enduringly successful was The Vision of Sir Launfal, a conventional, didactic, and sentimental account of an Arthurian knight’s Grail quest. Though Lowell published several additional volumes of poetry, none was as successful as these.

After Maria died in 1853, Lowell subordinated poetry to teaching, replacing Longfellow as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard in 1855. He served as the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1857-1861) and influenced the careers of many American writers. Lowell’s reputation as a writer and reformer eventually led to his appointment as minister to Spain (1877-1880) and England (1880-1885). He was elected to the Spanish Academy (1878) membership and awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge (1885).

In 1857, Lowell married Frances Dunlap, originally a governess for his sole surviving child, Mabel. After she died in 1885, Lowell returned to his family’s estate until he died in 1891. His reputation rests on his critical astuteness, effective and accurate use of Yankee dialect, and contributions as editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His poetry is rarely read.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Directly influenced by Longfellow’s successful career was John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), whose ambition to become the poetic voice of New England was inspired by Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” just as his introduction to the Scottish poet Robert Burns had awakened his appreciation for his natural surroundings.

Whittier’s devout Quaker parents—John Whittier and Abigail Hussey Whittier—were farmers in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where their second child, John Greenleaf, was born in 1807. The Whittiers were neither rich nor poor, but the family library was reasonably varied. Whittier’s father opposed his son’s continued education as impractical. When Whittier’s sister, Mary, sent one of his poems anonymously to William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor persuaded the Whittiers to allow their son to attend Haverhill Academy for two terms, though he had to earn his own way.

After Whittier left Haverhill Academy, his formal education ended, although his practical education continued. He edited several New England gazettes, including the pro-Whig American Manufacturer (Boston, 1828), Haverhill Gazette (1830 and again in 1836), the New England Weekly Review (Hartford, 1830), and National Era (Washington, 1845).

Increasingly, Whittier became an abolition movement propagandist, writing several abolitionist poems. “Massachusetts to Virginia” (1843) is his response to the Fugitive Slave Law. “Song of Slaves in the Desert” (1847) translates laments of a coffle of enslaved peoples being transported for sale. “Letter from a Missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, in Kansas to a Distinguished Politician” (1854) describes the abolitionist struggle in Kansas. “Laus Deo” (1865) reflects Whittier’s reaction to the ratification of the Thirteen Amendment. Although Whittier expresses his delight, he warns that slavery’s problems have not been alleviated.

More famous is “Ichabod” (1850), Whittier’s denunciation of Daniel Webster for supporting the Missouri Compromise. With sorrow and disappointment rather than anger, Whittier laments the departed honor and glory of the man he once idolized. In contrast, “Barbara Frietchie” (1863) and “Abraham Davenport” (1866) portray heroes who steadfastly maintain their principles. Barbara Frietchie is an older woman who refuses to lower her flag when the Confederates take control of her hometown. When a solar eclipse convinces the other Connecticut legislators that Judgment Day has arrived, Abraham Davenport insists on continuing his duty, ordering candles to combat the darkness. Less admirable is the subject of “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” (1857), a merciless sea captain whose cruelty finally drives the women of Marblehead to tar and feather him. The strength of this poem is Whittier’s use of dialect in a refrain chanted by the women.

Whittier’s greatest popularity came from his portraits of Yankee farm life. Whittier described his boyhood memories in his first poetry collection, Legends of New-England (1831). In “Telling the Bees” (1858), the first-person narrator learns of his beloved’s death when he sees a servant draping the hives with black ribbons. Failed love is also the subject of “Maud Muller” (1854), whose central characters admire each other from a distance but fail to make romantic overtures because they belong to different social classes. They think about what might have been for the rest of their lives. The sentimentality of these poems appealed to nineteenth-century readers, but most modern readers prefer less sentimental poems.

Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (1866) was Whittier’s tribute to his family, most of whom had died when the work was published. Whittier describes a winter storm that isolates a farm family for a week. To combat the sinister force of the storm, the family (a father and mother, their son and two daughters, a bachelor uncle, and an unmarried aunt) sit around the fire, exchanging stories of colonial days and the Revolution, observations about nature, and memories of their youth. To a country still predominantly rural but beginning to experience the effects of industrialization, this narrative poem presented a nostalgic look at the life they remembered or wished they had experienced. After the publication of Snow-Bound, Whittier suddenly became affluent, and his popularity continued for many years after he died in 1892 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. He was buried in the Amesbury cemetery with the family he had immortalized.

William Cullen Bryant

Though often grouped with the Fireside poets whom he rivaled in popularity, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was more closely associated with the Knickerbocker writers (such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper), as he spent most of his life as a New York City journalist. Though he was widely admired as a poetic prodigy in his own era, his reputation now rests on only a few nature poems. However, he is still respected for his long editorship of the New York Evening Post, where he advocated various reforms.

Born in Cummington, Massachusetts, Bryant was the son of Peter Bryant (a physician) and Sarah Snell Bryant, descended from old New England families. A sickly child, Bryant was allowed to roam the woods near his western Massachusetts home, where he developed an enduring love for nature. When Bryant was thirteen, his father helped him publish “The Embargo” (1808), an anti-Jeffersonian satire in which the young poet echoes his parents’ Calvinistic religion and Federalist politics. This poem established him as a prodigy. In 1817, the publication of “Thanatopsis” confirmed his virtuosity, and in 1821, he published his first collection, Poems.

Still not regarding poetry as his vocation, Bryant attended Williams College (1810-1811), then studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1815. After practicing law for several years, he turned to writing for magazines. He moved to New York to pursue a journalism career in 1825 and became an assistant editor at the New York Evening Post in 1826. In 1826, he was promoted to editor, a position he retained for fifty years. Philosophically, he abandoned conservative religion and politics, eventually becoming a founder of the Republican Party.

Bryant’s home life was apparently happy. In 1821, he married Francis Fairchild. Though she developed a disability, he devotedly cared for her. Daughters Frances and Julia were born in 1822 and 1832. In 1844, Bryant purchased a home on Long Island, which is still somewhat rural. Though his wife died in 1866, Bryant remained physically and intellectually active until a fall in May 1878, which led to a stroke and ultimately to his death on June 12, 1878. He willed his papers to the New York Public Library.

Among nineteenth-century readers, Bryant’s popularity rivaled that of Longfellow. Especially popular in textbooks was the 1821 revision of “Thanatopsis,” with sixteen and a half additional lines modifying the poem’s original stoicism and establishing nature as a consoler of humankind. Also frequently anthologized was “To a Waterfowl,” composed in December 1815. In this poem, somewhat depressed about his future, Bryant sees a lone waterfowl and remembers that Providence guides all creatures. Bryant also appealed to his readers when he praised forests as God’s first temples in “A Forest Hymn” (1825). “The Yellow Violet” (1814) didactically warns readers against forgetting early, simple flowers; “The Fringed Gentian” (1829) praises the last flower of the season. More sentimental is “The Death of the Flowers” (1825), in which Bryant parallels the death of flowers in the fall and the untimely death of a favorite sister. “The Two Graves” (1826), a further meditation on the soul's destination, insists that the dead would remain in familiar places until Resurrection day.

Modern readers find Bryant’s journalism more impressive than his poetry, which is generally considered too abstract and didactic, with language and meter subordinated to theme. Nevertheless, Bryant is considered important for establishing American poetry as a significant genre; in 1986, Fordham University published Under Open Sky: Poets on William Cullen Bryant (edited by John DePol and Norbert Kropt), contemporary poets’ analysis of Bryant’s place in American poetry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) wrote in several genres besides poetry, producing novels such as Elsie Venner (1861) and The Guardian Angel (1867). Collections of essays, including The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860), and The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872); biographies; and essays on medicine.

Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Abiel Holmes, a Congregational minister, and Sarah Wendell, a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. Early in his life, Holmes developed an interest in natural science, augmented by an interest in poetry. He was named class poet when he graduated from Harvard University in 1829 and received an M.D. from Harvard in 1836. He became a physician, research scientist, and teacher, serving as professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College (1839-1840) and the Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School (1847-1882).

In 1830, he wrote “Old Ironsides” in response to reports that the U.S.S. Constitution would be demolished. The poem's publication in the Boston Daily Advertiser helped save the frigate and brought Holmes to national prominence as a poet. That same year, Holmes published “The Last Leaf,” a poem in honor of Major Thomas Melville, praised by critic Poe and memorized by Abraham Lincoln. His first poetry collection, Poems, appeared in 1836. In 1831 and 1832, two essays entitled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” were published in the New England Magazine. In 1857, he published a series of Autocrat essays in the newly created The Atlantic Monthly that were later collected and published as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Two of his well-known poems, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece: Or, The Wonderful ’One-Hoss Shay’” and “The Chambered Nautilus,” first appeared in an Autocrat essay. “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” has generated some controversy regarding how it is interpreted, but it can be enjoyed for its use of New England dialect and humor. In “The Chambered Nautilus,” Holmes describes the growth of the nautilus, a sea creature that lives inside a shell to which it continually adds new chambers. He compares it to the need for humans to develop and progress.

Holmes was immensely popular during his lifetime, but like most Fireside poets, his popularity and critical acclaim have diminished. Many of his poems were occasional, and their relevance and appeal have faded. However, several of his poems are still anthologized and appreciated.

Bibliography

Babin, John William, et al. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Portland: The Fireside Poet of Maine. Arcadia Publishing, 2015. 

Bryant, William Cullen, et al. The Fireside Poets. A Movement in Verse. Copyright Group, 2023.

Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Beacon Press, 2016.

Justus, James J. “Fireside Poets: Hearthside Values and the Language of Care.” In Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by A. Robert Lee, Barnes & Noble, 1985.

Lowell, James Russell. The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell. Double 9 Books, 2023.

Muller, Gilbert H. William Cullen Bryant: Author of America. State University of New York Press, 2015.

Parini, Jay, editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford UP, 2004.

Pickard, Samuel Thomas. Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 1, University Press of the Pacific, 2005.

Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. University of New Hampshire Press, 2005.

---. “Teaching the Schoolroom Poets.” Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by Paula Bennett, et al., Modern Language Association of America, 2007.