Chapter 12 - Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the New England Tradition

Summary

The New England tradition was contested throughout the United States, its meanings were never monolithic, and authors like John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell are more interesting than literary history has remembered them to be. Whittier's relation to the antislavery movement was entirely print-mediated, and in the vexed political climate of the 1830s his publications made him notorious. Whitman Bennett has described Whittier's antislavery newspaper poems as a very special brand. The dialectical distinction between national and natural literature characterizes Lowell's stance on literary value: literature becomes national as it becomes natural, by growing from a global tradition. The decline of Lowell's productivity after the Civil War has been noted, but the Commemoration Ode really commemorates the passing of the kind of public verse he had championed, which once shaped the social order, but which will have a less important place in the new, postbellum world.