Fireside Poets (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England. The group is typically thought to comprise 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, nearly surpassing that of Alfred Lord Tennyson. The name "Fireside Poets" is derived from that popularity: The Fireside 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 also 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 which several of the poets were directly involved. The Fireside Poets did not write for the sake of other poets; they wrote for the common people. They meant to have their stories told for families.