The Library of America recently issued a volume of the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier. This is fitting. While he will never be placed in the first rank of poets and even his admirers admit that he authored much dismissible verse, Whittier, who enjoyed wide, trans-Atlantic fame in his lifetime and whose eightieth birthday was a national event, has earned a lasting place in American letters. He can justifiably be called our “best religious poet,” as one critic named him, and hymns adapted from his poems are still sung in many Protestant churches today. He is also the author of a number of memorable narrative poems, ballads, and lyrics.

Since he is possibly best known as an Abolitionist, it can come as a surprise to learn that during the Civil War years and their immediate aftermath, Whittier, in his maturity as both a man and a poet, is no longer writing the fiery verse propaganda in support of the cause that marked much of his earlier career, but has for some time been composing out of deeper inspiration and greater poetic resonance. His other poetic subjects apart from slavery—legend, history, nature, the past, and especially the spiritual life—come more to the fore, and even the poems he does write on the events of the day are often more skillful and fashioned with a broader scope.

Whittier was born of Quaker background in December 1807 on a farm near Haverhill, Massachusetts. He became an avid reader and, inspired by the work of Robert Burns, began to write poetry. He received only a little formal education, however, before embarking on a career in journalism. He edited newspapers in Boston, Haverhill, and Hartford, while continuing to write poems on a variety of subjects. In 1833 he became prominent in William Lloyd Garrison’s Abolitionist movement, and participated in the first National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia. In the ensuing years, Whittier edited an Abolitionist newspaper, The Pennsylvania Freeman, served a term in the Massachusetts legislature, wrote many anti-slavery poems, and gave speeches for the cause.

In 1840, he returned to his native state to live in Amesbury, not far from Haverhill, with his mother, Abigail, and his younger sister, Elizabeth. In 1842, believing that slavery could be ended through the political process, he broke with William Lloyd Garrison’s radicalism and began writing more expansively. During the years 1857–1863, Abigail, Elizabeth, and Whittier’s older sister Mary all died. This added to his reflectiveness, and the experience of loss and the potential for recovery and redemption become prominent in his poetry.

Whittier never regretted his part in the Abolitionist movement, and remarked later in his life in a letter to E.L. Godkin, editor of the Nation, “that I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Divine Providence that so early called my attention to the great interests of humanity, saving me from the poor ambitions and miserable jealousies of a selfish pursuit of literary reputation.” Nevertheless, his maturation as a poet came as he turned away from the “war on wrong,” as he calls it in the preface to his collection The Tent on the Beach (1867), toward poetry built more on experience and inspiration. He describes his earlier work deprecatingly in that same preface as the result of having “left the Muses’ haunts to turn/The crank of an opinion-mill,” although, admittedly, it was for the purpose of “turn[ing] the soil for truth to spring and grow.”

Home Ballads, Poems, and Lyrics, published in 1860, was comprised mostly of poems written during the previous decade, and scarcely touches on contemporary issues. Thus the most recent volume of Whittier’s that readers had in hand at the time of the crisis precipitated by the election of Abraham Lincoln presented Whittier more as the “folk poet of New England,” as Gay Wilson Allen calls him, than as the anti-slavery agitator of old. Many of the poems in this volume are based on the legends and history of New England. “The Double Headed Snake of Newbury,” for example, comes from seventeenth-century Puritan writer Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, as the poem itself reveals, and uses a folk tale about a snake with two heads to make a humorous comment on marriage. “The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall” also comes from Mather. The widely anthologized “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” is based on a true-life incident, but an author’s note that prefaces the poem confesses that it is not historically accurate, inasmuch as the poet did not have all the facts at the time of the writing.

Nevertheless, “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” bears the marks of a historical tale. Set in the New England seaboard town of Marblehead, seasoned with lines in local dialect, written in ballad form ideal for reading aloud, it tells the story of one Floyd Ireson, a sea captain who has been tarred and feathered by the women of Marblehead for sailing away from a sinking ship and abandoning its crew—“his own town’s-people”—to the waves. The enraged women are the sisters, mothers, and wives of the drowned sailers. In Whittier’s hand, the tale becomes one of vengeance, remorse, and, finally, forgiveness. The poem was judged “by long odds the best of modern ballads” by James Russell Lowell, another of New England’s notable nineteenth-century poets and a friend of Whittier’s.