John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox (review)

BOOK REVIEWS John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox. By Edward Wagenknecht. New York: Oxford University Press. 1967. 262 pages. $6.50. Amid the abundance of Professor Wagenknecht's interesting and scholarly books, his studies of authors are perhaps the best known. His sensitivity to the human condition has enabled him to reproduce the credible actuality of his protagonist, so that his Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, and now his Whittier, in their studied objectivity, may survive the shifting winds of fashion in criticism or the subjective preferences of a generation of impressionistic biographers and preconditioned readers. One cannot recognize an initial "thesis" in his Whittier; it can only be said that Wagenknecht's evident knowledge of the people called Friends, in Whittier's time and today, has enabled him, unlike other biographers, to understand that the influence of Quaker thought and Quaker society was not ultimately devisive, but in fact the consistent and formative influence; and that, in the long run, the poet's innate faith, offset by the unending necessity for nonconformity , unified his many-sided life and made him the protoytpe of the Friend today, the activist participant who retains the original character of "the seeker," dwells in the silence, but challenges what inward Light may seem to glow. Readers without the experience of Friends may not be fully aware of the gradual process of unity which Wagenknecht unfolds in Whittier's far flung activities as poet, protagonist of social reform, political agent and newspaper editor, and crusader against Negro slavery, the industrial slavery of women and workmen , and war and its merchants. Other biographers have emphasized the supposed contradictions in his activities and presumed trauma of his spirit. Time has been wasted in speculations, some Freudian, as to why he never married although numerous women were his ardent friends, particularly the reformers and what Cooper called "the damned race of scribbling women." Wagenknecht, properly dismisses sex as a problem—it obviously was not·—while giving interesting account of the poet's women friends and their letters. One simply gathers that Whittier was poor during his youth and middle life, enormously active and concerned, and intermittently in uncertain health. The biographer quotes some student's inadvertent solution: "Whittier was a Quaker. ... He never married. He hated slavery." Although Wagenknecht disproves the common image of Whittier beset by u confusion of activities, he notes the poet's one comic reference to his predicament in the Prologue to The Tent on tL· Beach, which portrays his fellow-writers at a "camp-out." Certainly it is comic that a poet "with a mission to fulfill,/Had left the Muse's haunts to turn/The crank of an opinion mill!" So comic that readers overlooked Whittier's quiet innuendo immediately following—that "his rustic reed of song" was in fact "a weapon in the war with wrong!" A weapon certainly, in the personal and political satires, such as the terrible indictment of Webster 49 50Quaker History for his compromises with slavery in "Ichabod," or in the withering satire of the southern support of the fugitive slave laws in "Massachusetts to Virginia." But it is his poetry of the people that keeps him in memory—"Snow-Bound" and "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim" (Pastorius), and such poems of the people as "The Shoemakers," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," and "Abraham Davenport," together with the lyrics of nature and religious experience; these remain in memory, along with works of only five or six other poets of his half-century. Wagenknecht is primarily concerned with the man Whittier, and with this poet as paradox, as he suggests in the book's title. The word is intended to defeat earlier misconceptions by assuming—what is true—that Whittier's seeming contradictions are paradoxically offset, as the poet persistently demonstrated in his poems. In his reality, such apparent dichotomies become unified, as he consciously states in his poems. "Out of the Misty Main" converge the "streams of his being," producing only "a small ripple," but that is himself—enigmatic, unique, puzzled. Nature combined in him, he says, both "the good fellow and recluse." The search for beauty enslaved his eye "while amazingly beneath lurked" the strife of passions; "sharing his neighbor...