48 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
artistic creations that proved the validity of his critical
theories.
John B. Pickard
NOTES
1. The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, ed.
Horace E, Scudder, Cambridge Edition (Boston, 1894), p. 189.
All poems cited and all quotations of poetry will be from this
book, unless otherwise stated.
2. The notes on Whittier in Harry Hayden Clark’s Major American
Poets (New York, 1936), pp. 802-816, contain the most com-
plete account of Whittier’s poetic theories and indicate a three-
fold maturing in the poet from romanticism to political liberal-
ism to “religious humanism.” The best introduction to Whittier’s
critical approach is found in Edwin H. Cady and Harry Hayden
Clark’s Whittier on Writers and Writing (Syracuse, 1950). They
note the wide variety of Whittier’s critical interests and indicate
his developing an “individual sort of realism” (p. 9). Erances
Mary Pray, A Study of Whittier’s Apprenticeship as a Poet
(Bristol, 1930), pp. 1-110, has a detailed investigation of the
early influences on Whittier’s poetry, but goes no further than
1835. Clarence Arthur Brown in his The Achievement of Amer-
ican Criticism (New York, 1954) places Whittier in a definite
historical perspective and concludes that Whittier was not in-
sensitive to literary technique but that “he always subordinated
it to the moral and humanitarian values of art” (p. 171).
Biographers of Whittier since George Rice Carpenter’s John
Greenleaf Whittier (Boston, 1903) have almost completely
ignored this important aspect. The most recent biography,
John A. Pollard, John Greenleaf Whittier: Friend of Man
(Boston, 1949), eliminates the poet for a detailed consideration
of the humanitarian.
3. The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Standard Library Edition,
7 Vois. (Boston, 1892), VI, 10, Hereafter cited as Works.
4. Carpenter, op. cit., p. 299.
5. The poem, “Bums,” written in 1854, when Whittier had finally
found his true métier, indicates this debt by commenting that
Bums had taught him to see “through all familiar things / The
romance underlying.”
6. Poems like “Moll Pitcher” and “Mogg Megone” imitate the nar-
rative type of historical romance which Scott had made so
popular. In his critical works Whittier refers to Byron more