Education of the republic of uzbekistan state world languages university english language faculty

John Greenleaf Whittier
The most outspoken of the Fireside Poets on the socially progressive beliefs they all shared was John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). In a career the reverse of Bryant’s, Whittier was a newspaper editor in the cause of abolition first and a poet second. Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), refers to Whittier as “the slave’s poet” and quotes the opening lines of Whittier’s “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to her Daughter Sold into Southern Bondage.” Only when first the North and then the nation was won over, by sentiment or by force, to the abolition of slavery did Whittier turn his pen to the poems of his New England youth that won him a larger audience and fame.
Whittier’s poetry retains, even at its finest, the characteristics of his beginning, when he wrote verses for the poet’s corner of country newspapers. Whereas Bryant took Wordsworth and Renaissance blank verse for his chief poetic models and Holmes took the Augustan couplets of Pope and Dryden, Whittier took, at best, the Scottish country poet Robert Burns. More commonly he took the style of naïve newspaper verse and imitative folk balladry. Although admiring “the songs of Spenser’s golden days” and “Arcadian Sydney’s silvery phrase,” Whittier acknowledges that such are not his gifts. Rather,
The rigor of a frozen clime,
The harshness of an untaught ear,
The jarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor’s hurried time,
Or Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.
Awkward rhymes, awkward rhythms, awkward phrasing and syntax—all the faults for which these lines seek pardon are in them displayed. The four-beat octosyllabic lines, Whittier’s favorite meter, are either end-stopped or clumsily enjambed, while the final hexameter fails completely, its late caesura confounding both the meter and the sense.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
That Oliver Wendell Holmes is remembered as a poet at all is probably a consequence of his close social relationship with the other poets of this group and the fame of three short lyrics: “Old Ironsides” (1836), “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858), and “The Deacon’s Masterpiece: or The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay’” (1858). Holmes’s more lasting contribution to American literature was in prose, the wry conversational essays of boardinghouse urbanity first published in the Atlantic and the collected in The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table (1858), The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860), and The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872), into which Holmes interpolated many of his poems. In addition, he was a genial yet dignified presence at dinners and gatherings in honor of various occasions, appearances for which much of his verse was written. He was by profession a medical man, a doctor and professor of medicine at Harvard, and some of his important writing, on the contagiousness of childbed fever or on the inefficacy of homeopathic medicine, doesn’t come under the category of belles-lettres literature at all. His medical experience informs three novels still of interest for the clinical, rather than moral, approach they take to human suffering and aberration. One of these, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (1861), put forward the idea of the New England Brahmin, an aristocracy not of inherited wealth or prestige but of inherited learning, a generally liberal and progressive class to which not just the author, but the author’s son, the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., belonged.