The Romantic view of the poet as a rebellious visionary whose work cuts across the grain of popular taste does not take into account the other strain in nineteenth-century poetry that confirmed cultural norms and rewarded writers who appealed to the sensibilities of a wide audience. Of these poets, few enjoyed the popularity and longevity of William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell. These writers were known collectively as the Fireside Poets, so named because they often sang the praises of domestic themes of home and hearth, or the Schoolroom Poets, because generations of American schoolchildren were required to commit their poems to memory.

While the Fireside Poets differed from each other in significant ways, critics today see a pattern in their work that confirms a nineteenth-century aesthetic. According to Thomas Wortham, they “typified values and desires that in the minds of thoughtful men and women in the nineteenth century were synonymous with culture or civilization.” In a culture of rapid change, art offered stability and escape, and the Fireside Poets provided “comfort in the familiar, the tried and true” in both their themes and their style. Their poems were marked by clarity and simplicity of expression, sentimentalism, serious moral purpose (even when delivered with wit and humor), and a generally conservative view of the past or of other cultures.

Above all, their verse reflected the popular ideologies of domesticity, piety, common sense, courage, and the earnest pursuit of a life well lived. All of the Fireside Poets shared fairly conventional moral sensibilities that led them to oppose social injustice, but with some notable exceptions by Whittier and Lowell, their poetry was largely concerned with the universal and the timeless, not with topics of immediate political relevance. The best poetic subjects, they believed, were those that were universal and close at hand, and the poet’s task was to reintroduce readers to things they already knew and to phrase them memorably. As Lowell put it in Among My Books, First Series (1870), “Surely the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar. He invents nothing, but seems rather to re-discover the world about him, and his penetrating vision gives to things of daily encounter something of the strangeness of new creation.”

Lowell’s pronouncement that the poet “invents nothing” unfairly minimizes the importance of originality for the Fireside Poets, for he also believed that “the changed conditions of modern life demand a change in the method of treatment.” Led by Longfellow, a master of his craft, the Fireside Poets were skillful versifiers who excelled in a variety of modes of expression—didactic, inspirational, satiric, sentimental, fantastic, and realistic—as well as in diverse poetic genres, such as elegies, commemorative and occasional verse, meditations, ballads, idylls, pastoral romances, and lyric celebrations of nature.

New Englanders all, and often considered together, in fact their lives and interests were significantly different. Bryant (1794–1878), who spent most of his life in New York, was a lawyer and newspaper editor. Whittier (1807–1892), a Quaker farmer and political activist, was distinguished for his abolitionism. Longfellow (1807–1882), like Lowell a classical scholar, taught languages and translated Dante. Holmes (1809–1894), famous for his wit and optimism, combined a celebrated career as a poet and novelist with a long tenure as a professor of medicine. Lowell (1819–1891) was an accomplished essayist, social critic, editor, diplomat, and teacher. Modern academic inattention to the Fireside Poets smacks of biographical irony, for Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes all held prestigious academic appointments at Harvard.

Despite the enormous popularity of the Fireside Poets in the nineteenth century, their presence in American literature anthologies is dwindling today. There are ample reasons for both phenomena. In 1898 Professor William Cranston Lawton, citing literature’s appeal to “universal human motives,” maintained that poets like Longfellow “uttered the sincerest and purest feelings of the uncounted millions, all around the globe, that use our English speech.” Much more recently, in her study of the place of poetry in American life, Joan Shelley Rubin argues that the Fireside Poets were “both icons and friends” for their nineteenth-century readers.

But as Wortham points out, the values and aesthetic of the Fireside Poets run counter to contemporary literary preferences for “absurdity, irrationality, elliptical compression, multivalences of symbolic meaning, [and] solipsistic agony.” Though the Fireside Poets are unlikely to enjoy a resurgence in popularity today, the poet Dana Gioia’s tribute to Longfellow is a model of the careful reclamation work yet to be done on a group of poets whose “vitality . . . current critical instruments are not designed to register.” Recent scholarship on their lives (by Gilbert Muller and Christoph Irmscher) and on their place in American culture (by Agnieszka Salska and Angela Sorby) suggests a renewed appreciation for their achievement.

In their own century the Fireside Poets were a true national treasure, poets who spoke—as Walt Whitman hoped to—in the register of the people and to the highest aspirations of their readers.

Topics for Discussion and Research

1. Among the major themes of the Fireside Poets are the following:

• The life well lived, with emphasis on striving and acting, as exemplified in the final stanza of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” (1838):
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

• Faith, endurance, and courage in the face of life’s obstacles. As Bryant writes in “Thanatopsis,” for instance, the fear of death is mediated by the knowledge that “All that breathe / Will share thy destiny.” During a time of religious divisiveness, the Fireside Poets were mostly nondenominational, more concerned with piety than theology.

• An awareness of human foibles and pretensions. See for example Lowell’s satiric Fable for Critics (1848) or Holmes’s lighthearted “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” (1858), a reminder of the impermanence of human achievements.

• The importance of the historical past, which for the Fireside Poets revealed the enduring truths of human existence. Good examples are Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847) and “Song of Hiawatha” (1855), which confirm national narratives of progress and loss, and Whittier’s lyric “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl” (1866), a testimony to the value of the remembered past. Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfel” (1849) combines the vogue for things medieval with the Fireside Poets’ attention to moral lessons, as Sir Launfel ends his grail quest with the realization that inward charity and compassion are more significant than earthly accomplishments:
The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s need,—
Not that which we give, but what we share,—
For the gift without the giver is bare;

Students might consider tracing one of these themes in poems by at least two of the authors, arguing whether or not the Fireside Poets were essentially interchangeable in their sentiments. Consider, too, whether the theme is treated idealistically or more realistically. For arguments on both sides, see the studies by Wortham (who characterizes the Fireside Poets’ verse as having “good feeling and hopeful expectations”) and Justus (who sees their worldview as guardedly optimistic).

2. Another fruitful topic for research is the biographical intersection between the Fireside Poets and their less conventional Romantic contemporaries. Whitman found a mentor in Bryant; Emerson admired Holmes’s wit and gifts for conversation; Hawthorne idolized Longfellow.

How influential were the relationships among the Fireside Poets and the Romantic writers more often read today, and in what ways was their work similar? One way to approach this topic is to focus on the biography—whether two figures knew each other well, what characterized their relationship, and how each regarded the other. Another approach would be to focus on themes. Consider, for instance, a comparison of the attitudes toward death in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” and in Emerson’s “Terminus” (1867) or between the politics in Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1848) and Lowell’s The Biglow Papers (1848), both of which express outrage at the Mexican-American War of 1846.

3. In a related vein, consider the work of the Fireside Poets alongside equally popular women poets of the time, such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the “Sweet Singer” of Hartford, Connecticut, or Alice and Phoebe Cary, two sisters from Cincinnati. Sigourney’s “Pocahontas” (1841), for instance, might be profitably compared to Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.”

To what extent do constructions of gender influence the choice and treatment of poetic subject matter, and is there evidence that either group wrote intentionally for a male or female readership?

4. The Fireside Poets achieved not only popular acclaim but also financial success, at a time when the profession of authorship offered new opportunities to make a living with one’s pen. Rubin’s study of poetry in American culture points out that by the 1840s poets could earn as much as $50 for a short poem published in a newspaper, and that editors were eager to include poems in annual gift books.

Consider the ways in which the commercial considerations of book culture and publishing might have encouraged the writing of certain types of poetry and how a writer as different from the Fireside Poets as Poe might also have appealed to popular reading tastes in an effort to make money. Charvat’s Literary Publishing in America treats the influence of commerce on the Fireside Poets and others.

Resources

Primary Works
William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, The New Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
James Russell Lowell, Among My Books, 37th edition (1870; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893).

Biography
Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
A reevaluation of Longfellow’s career and his relationship with his readership.

Gilbert H. Muller, William Cullen Bryant: Author of America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
Examines Bryant’s achievement as a poet, civic leader, and promoter of literary nationalism.

Criticism
William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).
Considers the social and economic contexts for the rise of authorship as a profession in the United States.

Dana Gioia, “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 64–96.
An appreciative tribute, carefully detailing Longfellow’s career and poetic accomplishments.

James H. Justus, “The Fireside Poets: Hearthside Values and the Language of Care” in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by A. Robert Lee (Totowa, N.J. & London: Barnes & Noble & Vision, 1985), pp.146–165.
Makes the case that in a world of grief and pain, the mission of the Fireside Poets was “to help assuage the received condition” of humanity. Excellent readings of the major poems.

William Cranston Lawton, The New England Poets: A Study of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes (1898; Plainview, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972).
Presents the case for universality as the hallmark of the Fireside Poets.

Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
Examines the roles of poets and poetry for American readers, focusing on the 1880s through the 1950s. Chapter 2, “Amateur and Professional,” is devoted to the Fireside Poets.

Agnieszka Salska, “From National to Supranational Conception of Literature: The Case of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 20 (December 2006): 611–628.
Traces the evolution of Longfellow’s poetic program from nationalism to universalism.

Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005).
Examines the uses of the Schoolroom Poets, particularly Longfellow and Whittier, in American education, and the increasing child-centeredness of poetry in the nineteenth century.

Thomas Wortham, “William Cullen Bryant and the Fireside Poets,” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 278–288.
Argues that the Fireside Poets embodied “a unity of purpose and public success” because they affirmed the values of their culture and time.

Categories: Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature

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