SOURCE: "Whittier Criticism Over the Years," in Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. C, No. 3, July, 1964, pp. 159-82.

In the following excerpt, the author contrasts the backgrounds and biases of various Whittier critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

From time to time it is interesting as well as profitable to review the course of the critical fortunes of our writers and to compare the evaluations of their contemporaries with those of a later generation. Such an examination is particularly interesting in the case of a writer like John Greenleaf Whittier, who enjoyed great popular acclaim.

The period of about one hundred and twenty years of Whittier criticism covered by this survey falls neatly in two parts divided roughly by Whittier's death at the turn of the century. The criticism in the first period has two disadvantages which that of the second does not have to face. When an...