Reflection Blog- Fireside Poets

So far, what I have learned about fireside poets is that they were admired by many Americans back in the day. The fireside poets were a group of popular American writers, and they got their name because it was thought that many families would read their poetry by the fire (Wilhelm 210). These poets were famous for creating extremely vivid pictures of the New England countryside in their poems and also for including important events that took place in American their narrative poems (Wilhelm 210). I think that it is really cool that families would all sit around the fire together and tell stories and read poems because that seems like it could be really relaxing. After reading about some of the fireside poets, I noticed that they were very descriptive in their writing. What I mean by they are descriptive is that they make things seem very real and vivid in their writing. William Cullen Bryant was the oldest fireside poet, and he was also the first poet to include American landscape in poems (Wilhelm 210). He wrote all about the nature he encountered as he went hiking, for example, in William Cullen Bryant's To the Fringed Gentian, he uses very descriptive writing when he says "Thou blossom bright with autumn dew, and colored with the heaven's own blue, that openest with the quiet light, succeeds the keen and frosty night" (Wilhelm 211). In this passage, William Cullen Bryant uses many descriptive words that help us as readers picture what he is writing about. This is different from the writers from our previous sections because I think they are much more descriptive in their writing than the writers of the other time periods were. Another example of the descriptive writing style used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his work Old Ironsides is when he says "Beneath it rung the battle shout, and the burst the cannon roar; - the meteor of the ocean air shall sweep the clouds no more" (Wilhelm 211). I think its really cool that they use so many descriptions in their works because to me that makes reading so much more interesting and enjoyable. Also, the fireside poets are different from the writers of our previous sections in the fact that their poems are not about religion or logic. Most of the writings we have looked at in class are either linked to some form of religion or are logical/scientific, and these writings are neither of those. I do not really know what to call these writings, but to me they do not seem to fit into either of the two categories we have studied this far. I think that it is really cool that families would sit together and recite poems written by these poets because it shows a lot about the content of the poems. It tells us as readers that there was obviously something about these poems that people really liked, and with the fireside poets it was the fact that they could relate to them. The works of the fireside poets represented many values that were important to families back then, such as hard work, respect, and courage (Wilhelm 210).

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D., and Douglas Fisher. Glencoe Literature. New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2009. 210-111. Web. 21 Nov. 2011.