Biography Essay

John Greenleaf Whittier's importance to America's cultural life, and the claim he makes on our remembrance, is at least twofold. In the first place his life was and remains a model of dedication to the twin principles of freedom and tolerance. In the long struggle to abolish slavery the Quaker Whittier played an important role as a poet, as a politician, and as a moral force; and yet, though he was an ardent reformer, he was saved from the besetting sin of reformers—a narrowing and self-consuming zeal-by his equal insistence on tolerance, a quality he had come to cherish all the more through his study of the persecution of the Quakers. But if Whittier's life was dramatic for the moral, political, and, on occasion, the physical conflicts it contained, his poetry— the best of it—is of even greater significance. Poets are...