John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography (review)

Book Reviews71 tions from all three autobiographical volumes with great care, capturing unforgettable moments in her life and yet giving a sense of the coherent wholeness of it. He has rendered the within-ness of her writing in sensitive English prose. Although at one level Emilia Fogelklou experienced throughout life many sorrows, hardships and rebuffs that hurt her deeply, at another level she lived in the very center of the reality she experienced in that mystical happening at age 23. From that time on intellectual concerns and debates took on a different cast. She writes "views and opinions were no longer of concern. Now it was the reality behind the interpretation, and the radiance that came from that reality which mattered" (p.84) The phrases that recur in her writing are keys to the reality in which she lived: living from within, experiencing the within-ness and the radiance of God in creation ("without wrapping paper") standing in the presence of something other, reaching out to reality, and, over and over again, not running away, going right on through (tvarsigenom) all the obstacles that stand between oneself and reality. If Emilia had taken a direct ascent to perfection after her youthful mystical experience the extraordinary presence which inspired and awed all those who knew her in her later years could surely not have developed. She both lived from within and never flinched from struggling "right on through" the difficult external circumstances in which she was often placed. She had to cope with recurring depressions and feelings of worthlessness, rejection and loneliness, with miserable dailinesses that make her like the rest of us. Yet when she was with others, and she was openheartedly available to schoolchildren, neighbors and local community right up to her last years, she radiated her own becoming . On her tombstone are her own words: There is light still. Boulder, ColoradoElise Boulding John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography. By Roland H. Woodwell. Amesbury, Mass.: Trustees of the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, 1985. 636 pp. illus. $20.00. A lifelong interest in the poet Whittier and 43 years of teaching and living in Amesbury, Massachusetts, where Whittier spent most of his life have resulted in what Roland H. Woodwell calls "an old-fashioned biography without 'interpretation or theme.' At the age of 84 Mr. Woodward has produced what may well stand as the definitive biography of the Quaker poet. Lavishly illustrated and carefully documented it contains all that anyone will ever need to know about Whittier's life. What it does not attempt to do is to make a critical estimate of Whittier's poetry, beyond a sentence in the final paragraph in which Whittier is said to offer "a keenly observed and clearly presented view of outward nature, a direct and sincere appreciation of the best in the hearts and souls of men, a hatred of wrong and oppression and confident approach to a God of love — these in familiar words, figures and rhythms." (p. 530) The plan of the book is strictly chronological. Most of the 36 chapters, after the first three, cover no more than two years apiece. In each chapter the poems written in that period are summarized — the ephemeral, celebratory verses as well as serious and important poems like "Snowbound" or "Ichabod," Whittier 's brief, brilliant denunciation of Daniel Webster after he had voted for the Fugitive Slave Act. As a result of this arrangement the later poem, "The Lost Occasion," which Whittier directed should stand next to "Ichabod" not 72Quaker History as apology but as complement, is in this book separated from it by 226 pages. This arrangement also results sometimes in an odd juxtaposition of important and trivial events. Chapter XX, for instance, which covers the eighteen months from April 1859 to September 1860 jumbles together Whittier's correspondence with Elizabeth Lloyd Howell and their possible brief engagement, his first meeting with the novelist Gail Hamilton, John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry, the suicide of a friend, the publication of a book of poems of which the dozen written in that period are summarized, and the annual "Laurel Party" in 1859 which is later also described in seven subsequent chapters. The...