James Russell Lowell, Fireside Poet

James Russell Lowell

It is the birthday of poet James Russell Lowell (1819), the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly and one of the writers known as the Fireside Poets, because their use of standard meter and structure made them easy to memorize and very popular for home entertainment around the fireplace in the 19th century. Lowell's contemporaries included William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. His ability to capture New England dialect and his use of satire in his work inspired William Dean Howells, Ring Lardner, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.