Courtesy of The Armstrong Browning Library

Written by Melinda Creech, Graduate Assistant, Armstrong Browning Library

John Greenleaf Whittier, one of the Fireside Poets, was a Quaker poet and an abolitionist. He was influenced by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Whittier is most remembered for his poem “Snow-Bound.”

The Armstrong Browning Library owns eighteen Whittier letters, two manuscripts, and over eighty books authored by Whittier.

Letter from John Greenleaf Whittier to Mary E. Smith. 2 March 1833.

In this letter to his dear friend Mary E. Smith, Whittier quotes his poem “Lines on a Portrait” and “To ___,” a poem by his sister, Elizabeth H. Whittier.

John Greenleaf Whittier. Literary Recreations and Miscellanies. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.

This volume is a first edition presentation copy from the publisher.

[John Greenleaf Whittier, et al]. Memory and Hope. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851.

This volume, a book of poems referring to childhood, also includes poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, James Russell Lowell, Maria Lowell, Mary Howitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Quincy Adams, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and others.