Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl

“Snow-Bound” is regarded as among the most accomplished and ambitious expressions of the Fireside Poets, an accidental conspiracy of writers loosely gathered around the Boston area who for most of the first half of the 19th century sought self-consciously and deliberately to create something called American poetry.

These poets—in addition to Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell—were among the first generation born not British colonists but rather American citizens. They proudly took as their subject matter the stuff of their new country, its peoples, its natural wonders, its history, its folk tales, its agrarian culture, eager to demonstrate to the world, or more exactly to the reviled Great Britain, that America was a fit subject for poetic expression. But the poems were heavily indebted to inherited forms of British poetry. As such, the best works of the Fireside Poets are something of a grand Declaration of Dependence. In mimicking sophisticated British poetic forms, they sought to demonstrate that this new country was no backwater illiterate subculture.

These poets, then, used American subject matter as an opportunity to instruct their readers. Theirs was poetry used to offer wisdom, great existential ideas about august themes such as mortality, nature, patriotism, the soul, and the role of art.