Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807–1892)

US poet, journalist, and abolitionist. A religious Quaker, he wrote on rural and antislavery themes and became a close associate and friend of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He served in the Massachusetts legislature in 1835. Breaking with Garrison's radical abolitionist ideals, he was one of the founders of the Liberty Party in 1839 and the Republican Party in 1854. His most popular work, the narrative poem Snow-Bound, was published in 1866.

Whittier was born into a Quaker farming family in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Although he received a limited formal education, he was an avid reader, especially of British poetry. His first poem, ‘The Exile's Departure’, was accepted by Garrison in 1826 for the abolitionist newspaper Newburyport Free Press. His pamphlet ‘Justice and Expediency’ aroused antislavery sentiment, and he became one of the abolitionist movement's most famous writers. His first book to be published was Legends of New England in Prose and Verse (1831). He edited several abolitionist newspapers, and his poems on slavery were collected as Voices of Freedom (1846). After the Civil War, he returned to pastoral themes and became a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Whittier was a popular poet who wrote in a simple style for ordinary people to understand; some critics claim that he was too sentimental and emotional to be a great poet. One of his best-known poems is ‘Maud Muller’ (1854), which contains the lines, ‘Of all sad words of tongue and pen/ The saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.