WHITTIER'S VALUE

...What lived on, like a skeleton in a grimness of bone, was merely a pattern of Puritan standards and values, narrow and provincial but sincere, and, like a skeleton again, falling apart...

...Snowbound remains a unique and incomparable evocation of the American winter: there is no winter piece in any other literature quite like it...

...It is a pity that there are times when the "friend of man" pretty much overwhelms the poet...

...Lowell, born in 1819, was a middle-aged professor at Harvard when the Civil War perplexed the nation, while Longfellow and Whit-tier, both born in 1807, were men well along in years...

...As Calvinism faded, leaving its cerebral vacuum, the 19th Cenutry came rolling in over the debris of the 18th, causing a confusion of ideas, causes, and militant fads to spring into existence everywhere until the white steeples shook and the lovely autumnal maple leaves must have fluttered down on the winds of oratory...

...Cleft and shattered by the Unitarian schism, the Calvinism of the Puritan forefathers was well-nigh dead as a theological dogma...

...Would that Mr...

...Emerson, the oldest and perhaps the most typical of New England, had arrived in 1803...

...Our age has grown rather shy of professional "friends of man," knowing them (not Whittier) often to be notably mischievous, but of a good poet no age ever tires...

...But it ought to be in every American library...

...I wish I could say I find the book as interesting as it is worthwhile, but I find the volume heavy going...

...Was it at this hour that the curious Messianic gleam in the spectrum of the American spirit began to show itself distinctly...

...but, to my mind at least, it has no wings...

...It is the strength of John A. Pollard's John Greenleaf Whittier that it shows clearly and perhaps for the first time the confused world .of ideas in which the poet and his equals had their being, and in so doing he has written a most valuable work...

...It has facts, a mountain of them...

...Pollard wisely has not subtitled his volume "Poet etc...

...but "Friend of Man," for that is the perspective of his study...

...6 Reviewed by Henry Beston WHAT A curious place New England must have been in the first half of the 19th Century...

...it has intellectual honesty and good will...

...Pollard's book is more a book for the libraries than for one's study table...

...Whittier, though his range was not great, was a real poet, as British criticism has long known...

...Pollard had given more space to the true poetry and figures associated with it...

...All in all, Mr...

...Our New England poets, so bearded and benign, have with such success taken over the school houses of the nation that we often forget their work was written against this background of Yankee sturm und drang...