43 pages • 1 hour read
John Greenleaf WhittierSnow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“Snow-Bound” is regarded as among the most accomplished and ambitious expressions of the Fireside Poets, an accidental conspiracy of writers loosely gathered around the Boston area who for most of the first half of the 19th century sought self-consciously and deliberately to create something called American poetry.
These poets—in addition to Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell—were among the first generation born not British colonists but rather American citizens. They proudly took as their subject matter the stuff of their new country, its peoples, its natural wonders, its history, its folk tales, its agrarian culture, eager to demonstrate to the world, or more exactly to the reviled Great Britain, that America was a fit subject for poetic expression. But the poems were heavily indebted to inherited forms of British poetry. As such, the best works of the Fireside Poets are something of a grand Declaration of Dependence. In mimicking sophisticated British poetic forms, they sought to demonstrate that this new country was no backwater illiterate subculture.
These poets, then, used American subject matter as an opportunity to instruct their readers. Theirs was poetry used to offer wisdom, great existential ideas about august themes such as mortality, nature, patriotism, the soul, and the role of art. The value came not from the themes—the ideas were rather conventional and expected—but rather from the carefully sculpted poetic expression itself, rigidly metered and intricately rhymed. The Fireside Poets were staggeringly popular in America. The poets’ likenesses adorned schoolroom walls. Generations of schoolchildren dutifully memorized their poems. Their works sold widely. Their poems were read in family gatherings in parlors. Their funerals became state events. They were America’s poets. From a literary perspective, however, if the subject matter was defiantly American, the voice was distinctly British.
Historical Context
Improbably enough, Whittier’s poem, despite its ambitious length, its erudite and heightened poetic diction, and its intimidating poetic form (more than 700 tightly rhymed, carefully metered lines), became one of the biggest selling books of its era, selling an astounding 10,000 copies in just its first two weeks. The sales catapulted Whittier, known at the time largely as a firebrand liberal journalist, into the ranks of the nation’s foremost poets. Why? What was it about America in 1866 that made Snow-Bound, a lengthy reminiscence of a bitter blizzard in the rural Outback of post-Revolutionary War Massachusetts, a national cultural event?
First, in 1866, America was war-weary after surviving a bloody civil war with its brutal and bloody cannibal logic. In Whittier’s gentle evocation of family and friends gathered around a comforting roaring hearth and happily sharing stories as a way to defy the howling storm outside, American readers found a pleasing tonic for years of savage division and angry confrontation. The poem’s tone, at once reassuring and inviting, sounded a perfect respite from the shrill, heated rhetoric of war. It was a gentle poem, tonic for a nation that needed to heal.
More broadly, however, America was just beginning its rapid embrace of industrialization. America was expanding and leaving behind its rustic rural roots. The mid-1860s, with the war over, marked the first stirrings of a unified America as an international economic powerhouse. Over the next decade, cities, teeming with newly arrived immigrants, would come to dominate the American economy. In 1866, America, unsure of where it was headed, longed for what it was leaving behind. America still maintained a cultural memory of itself as an agrarian culture, that pastoral world rapidly becoming a nostalgic misty world of hard-working families, proud, honest, independent, resilient, and driven by a fierce sense of oneness with the beauty and power of the natural world. By 1866, that world was all but lost. Thus, Whittier’s Happy Days evocation of that time was both comforting and inviting, a kind of sentimental national daydream, as was his assurance at the poem’s end that such a lost world was as available as a reverie.
