America’s Fireside Poets

The fireside poets – also known as the schoolroom or household poets – were a group of 19th-century American poets associated with New England. These poets were very popular among readers and critics both in the United States and overseas. Their domestic themes and messages of morality presented in conventional poetic forms deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity at the beginning of the 20th century.

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm–The Oxbow. 1836, Thomas Cole. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org

Overview
The group is typically thought to include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who were the first American poets whose popularity rivaled that of British poets, both at home and abroad. Ralph Waldo Emerson is occasionally included in the group as well. The name “fireside poets” is derived from that popularity; their writing was a source of entertainment for families gathered around the fire at home. The name was further inspired by Longfellow’s 1850 poetry collection The Seaside and the Fireside. Lowell published a book titled Fireside Travels in 1864 which helped solidify the title.

In an era without radio, television, or Internet, these poets were able to garner a general public popularity that has no equivalent in the 21st century. Their influence was furthered by their long lives, as well as their other high-profile activities, including serving as professors and academic chairs, editing popular newspapers, serving as foreign diplomats, giving popular speeches, and translating works by Dante and Homer.

These poets’ general adherence to poetic convention (standard forms, regular meter, and rhymed stanzas) made their body of work particularly suitable for memorization and recitation in school and at home. Only Emerson rejected the traditional European forms that his contemporaries often utilized and instead called for new American poetic models and emphasized content over form. The poets’ primary subjects were domestic life, mythology, and the politics of the United States, in which several of them were directly involved. The fireside poets did not write for the sake of other poets, for critics, or for posterity. Instead, they wrote for a contemporary audience of general readers. Emerson once wrote, “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.”

Most of the fireside poets lived long lives. A culminating event was the 70th birthday party of Whittier in 1877 organized by publisher Henry Oscar Houghton, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The event was meant to serve as a symbol of the magazine’s association with the poets. Most of them were present for the celebration, though Lowell had recently moved to Spain. Longfellow’s 74th birthday in 1881 was honored nationwide with celebrations in schools throughout the United States. Between 1884 and 1900, readers’ polls consistently placed these poets as the nation’s most important writers.

Generally, these poets promoted nationalist values and, as such, were deemed especially appropriate for study among children. Horace Scudder in his 1888 book Literature in School emphasized this point:

They were born on American soil; they have breathed American air; they were nurtured on American ideas. They are Americans of Americans. They are as truly the issue of our national life as are the common schools in which we glory. During the fifty years in which our common-school system has been growing to maturity, these six have lived and sung; and I dare to say that the lives and songs of Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell have an imperishable value regarded as exponents of national life.