SOURCE: "Whittier the Poet," in John Greenleaf Whittier, The Macmillan Company, 1907, pp. 150-70.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1902, Higginson discusses the influence of religion and of moral and philosophical issues on Whittier's distinctive American style.

In . . . considering Whittier's more general claims as a poet, we must accept Lord Bacon's fine definition of poetry that "It hath something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do." In this noble discrimination,—which one wonders not to have been cited among the rather inadequate arguments to prove that Lord Bacon was the real Shakespeare,—we have the key, so far as there is any, for the change from the boy Whittier, with his commonplace early rhymes, into the man...