Barbara Frietchie

Whittier is often referred to as one of the fireside poets, who are also sometimes called the schoolroom or household poets. In addition to Whittier, the fireside poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), and James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). They came mainly from the northeastern part of the country, and they were all popular, successful, influential poets in their day, providing moral edification as well as the delight of poetry to thousands of readers. Families would read their poetry aloud as they gathered around the fire in the winter—hence the term fireside poets. These were the first American poets to establish a reputation and a readership that rivaled the great British poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and William Wordsworth. They wrote many long narrative poems in conventional poetic forms with rhyme and meter, often in a way that people found easy to learn by heart and recite for themselves. Longfellow, for example, the most renowned of the five, was famous for his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha as well as the shorter “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which celebrates an episode in the life of one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War.