Celibate

QUAKER MILITANT: JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER-- Albert Mordell --Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Whittier's very name sounds to modern ears like the tremulous, piping voice of an aged Victorian. In a stout effort to deepen and dignify Poet Whittier's note Biographer Mordell writes this life of Whittier, the first in almost 30 years. Author Mordell denies that his hero was "a modest, mild and passionless saint," admits that he eventually became a "reactionary and religionist . . . harmless genial poet of the people," but reminds the reader that Whittier was also a "mil itant and radical agitator who was charged on a number of occasions with blasphemy and sedition. . . . This favorite poet of juvenile readers and composer of hymns for the elderly was for the greater and more important period of his poetic life a stormy prophet."

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) was a Massachusetts farm boy and a Quaker, who lifted up his eyes to Parnassus and neighboring hills. Soon his poems began appearing in newspapers; he left the farm and took to journalism. Even in his salad days his poems were notable for their uprightness; he considered the age poisoned by the licentiousness of Byron and Shelley, and in later years was said to have hurled a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass into the fire. But he was soon to pipe a fiercer tune. Sacrificing his personal ambition to the cause of Liberty, he "knocked Pegasus on the head, as a tanner does his bark-mill donkey, when he is past service," and at 25 became an Abolitionist. Instead of eulogies from the critics he got rotten eggs and catcalls, more than once had to drop his dignity and take to his heels. Of his anti-slavery poems Biographer Mordell says: "They . . . are too dangerous to be introduced into the schools. They still breathe that 'blasphemy' and 'sedition' of which vested interests are in mortal fear."

Whittier was a very handsome man, most attractive to women, says Author Mordell and he found time in between his propaganda work to carry on a lengthy series of flirtations. None of them came to anything. His first few loves rejected him because he was too poor; after that he seems to have become shyer of committing himself. At least once he was proposed to (by Poetess Mary Abigail Dodge), but weaseled out of it. Between the ages of 60 and 80 he attracted poetesses particularly, but "though in two or three poems he even condoned illicit love, he retained his chastity until he died at the age of 85."

One of the charter members of the G.O. P., Whittier always voted Republican. After the Civil War had settled the Abolitionists' hash, Whittier had had enough of radicalism. When William Dean Howells was circulating a petition for clemency for the Chicago anarchists (1887), Whittier refused to sign it. A thrifty Yankee, he spent little, invested wisely, left $125,000 when he died.

Though Biographer Mordell thinks

Whittier "really deserves a place with Walt Whitman among our great American poets," unconvinced readers may still prefer James Russell Lowell's dictum: "If we should attempt to depict the peculiar characteristic of Whittier, we should say that of all poets he most truly deserved the name orator."

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