The Fireside Poets

The terms “Fireside Poets” or “Schoolroom Poets” are used to designate a group of five poets—William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—who were popular in America in the latter half of the 19th century. Their poetry was read both around household firesides, often aloud by a mother or father to the gathered family, and in schoolrooms, where they inculcated wisdom and morals and patriotic feeling in America’s young. While they continued to be taught in K-12 classrooms well into the 20th century, they lost their standing first with critics and then with college and university professors with the coming of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century. Despite scattered attempts to restore both their critical reputations and their place in the curriculum, they continue to have only a marginal place in the minds of those most familiar with poetry. The Postmodern/New Historicist challenges to modernism find little of interest in them—Belknap’s A New Literary History of America (2009), for instance barely mentions them—while the neo-Victorian turn toward socially conscious literature, which might be expected to retrieve them, has so far paid them little mind, though some attention has recently been given to their environmental and Native American themes. But this marginalization may more reflect the marginalization of poetry as a whole in American society at large than a true estimate of their worth to common readers. While young students no longer read Longfellow’s Evangeline or Bryant’s “The Chambered Nautilus,” these poets may yet form the vanguard of a restoration of the enjoyment of poetry in America.