Fireside Poets

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets^[1]) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England. The group is usually described as comprising 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 rivalled that of British poets, both at home and abroad. The name "Fireside Poets" is derived from that popularity: The Fireside Poets' general adherence to expected poetic convention—standard forms, regular meter, and rhymed stanzas—made their body of work particularly suitable for memorization and recitation, both in schools and at home, where it was a source of entertainment for families gathered around the fire. The poets' primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of America, in the latter of which several of the poets were directly involved.