April is National Poetry Month, and Brenda Wineapple, the Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies (currently on leave), has edited “John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems” as part of the American Poets Project of the Library of America.
“His diction is easy, his detail rich and unassuming, his emotion deep,” writes Wineapple. “And the shale of his New England landscape reaches outward, promising not relief from pain but a glimpse of a better, larger world.”
Whittier (1807-1892) was a Quaker and abolitionist whose works include “The Hunters of Men,” “Song of Slaves in the Desert” and “Ichabod!,” his mournful attack on Daniel Webster's betrayal of the anti-slavery cause.