Whittier Inducted into the American Poets' Corner

Abstract

Whittier Inducted into the American Poets' Corner Daniel Hoffman* During a vespers service on Sunday, 27 October 1996, John Greenleaf Whittier was inducted into the Poets' Corner in the Cathedral ofSt. John the Divine in New York City. The Poets' Corner, established in 1983 under the aegis ofDean James Parks Morton, occupies a bay offthe northern aisle of the nave. Each year a Board of Electors, comprised of a dozen eminent poets and writers and the Cathedral Poet in Residence (in which post I have served since 1988) chooses two distinguished authors to be installed in the Corner. The other writer chosen in 1996 was Ernest Hemingway. Among the hymns sung by the Cathedral choir were settings of two by Whittier, "Dear Lord and Father ofmankind" and "All things are thine; no gift have we." The dedicatory service included readings from the chosen authors by two writers especially interested in their work, and brief observations on their significance. The poet and critic John Hollander, editor ofthe Library of America anthology American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, read passages from the opening and conclusion of "Snowbound." I began the program with the remarks that follow here. When I was young, Whittier was one of the Bearded Bards on the schoolroom wall—along with Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes— and ofcourse the cleanshaven Emerson. Ofthese, nowadays only Emerson is in critical favor. Since the advent ofmodernism among the complications oflife in the 20th century, the poems ofWhittier once memorized by every school child—"Barefoot Boy with Cheek of Tan," "Barbara Frietchie," "Telling the Bees," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride"—are now thought too sentimental, too patriotic, too prolix, too simplistic for contemporary taste. In addition to these old favorites, Whittier also wrote reams offacile verse, and a couple of fine poems, to encourage and defend the Abolitionist movement. This was aposition hardly more popular in the North than in the South, a conviction requiring physical as well as moral courage. As a Quaker he expressed the heritage ofJohn Woolman and Benjamin Lay and propounded his abhorrence of slavery and of war. To introduce Whittier I offer passages from a poem published 48 years ago by another admirerwho, like his subject, lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts . "Mr. Whittier" was the title poem ofa volume, much acclaimed at the time, by the late Winfield Townley Scott: *Daniel Hoffman is a former Consultant in Poetry ofthe Library ofCongress, the appointment now designated Poet Laureate. He is a member of Swarthmore Monthly Meeting. 42Quaker History It is so much easier to forget than to have been Mr. Whittier. It is easier to leave Snow-Bound and a dozen other items in or out of The school curriculum than it is to have written them. Try it and see. Born where the east wind brought the smell of the ocean from Plum Island upriver, At a brookside haunted in the foggy dark of summer nights By six little witches in sky-blue caps—Uncle Moses had seen them;— Born on a farm to the Bible, Pilgrim 's Progress, a weekly paper, the Quaker Meeting-house, To hard poverty, obscure, and a few winters of country school; To die—though only after there were thirteen for dinner, and the clock Suddenly stopped—ancient with fame, with honorary degrees, and One hundred thousand dollars all made out ofpoems—I say Even this was not easy, though also it is not What I am talking about, but is really incidental along with Not liking Walt Whitman and never quite affording marriage. Neither, under the circumstances, could it have been easy, and it was important, To stand suddenly struck with wonder of old legends in a young land, To look up at last and see poetry driving a buckboard around the bend, And poetry all the time in the jays screeching at the cats in the dooryard, Climbing with the thrush into the August noon out of the boy's sight As he dawdled barefoot through poetry among the welts of the goldenrod; But nothing is hardest which treads on nobody else's toes. Let us not begrudge Mr. Whittier his white beard, his saintliness, his other foibles; Let us remember him when...