One of the Fireside poets, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 -1892) was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate for the abolition of slavery in the United States. After school Whitter worked as editor of the National Philanthropist, a Boston-based temperance weekly. In 1833 he published the pamphlet Justice and Expediency and dedicated the next 20 years to the slavery cause. Religious Poems, Part 2., from Poems of Nature, Poems Subjective and Reminiscent and Religious Poems contains the following poems The Answer, The Eternal Goodness, The Common Question, Our Master, The Meeting, The Clear Vision, Divine Compassion, The Prayer-Seeker, The Brewing of Soma, A Woman, The Prayer of Agassiz, The Friend's Burial, A Christmas Carmen, and many more.
1807-1892
John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Although he received little formal education, he was an avid reader who studied his father's six books on Quakerism until their teachings became the foundation of his ideology. Whittier was heavily influenced by the doctrines of his religion, particularly its stress on humanitarianism, compassion, and social responsibility.
Whittier produced two collections of antislavery poetry: Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between 1830 and 1838 and Voices of Freedom (1846). He was an elector in the presidential election of 1860 and of 1864, voting for Abraham Lincoln both times.
The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended both slavery and his public cause, so Whittier turned to other forms of poetry for the remainder of his life.
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