Linking religion, nature, and poetry, as well as social reform. Used poetry for reform, particularly in abolitionism. Spiritualism, Christianity, prophet. Writers have an inherent insight into the moral nature of humanity and have an obligation for literary action along with their aesthetic function. Called for a natural literature, regardless of country, caste, or race, and warned against provincialism which might "put farther off the hope of one great brotherhood."

Eye dialect: heavily ungrammatical phonetic spelling of the Yankee dialect. In using this vernacular, Lowell intended to get closer to the common man's experience and was rebelling against more formal and, as he thought, unnatural representations of Americans in literature.

Contemporary critic and editor Margaret Fuller wrote, "his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him." Duyckinck thought Lowell was too similar to other poets like William Shakespeare and John Milton. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that, though Lowell had significant technical skill, his poetry "rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem ... and which is felt in the pervading tone, rather than in brilliant parts or lines." Even his friend Richard Henry Dana Jr., questioned Lowell's abilities, calling him "very clever, entertaining & good humored ... but he is rather a trifler, after all." In the twentieth century, poet Richard Armour dismissed Lowell, writing: "As a Harvard graduate and an editor for the Atlantic Monthly, it must have been difficult for Lowell to write like an illiterate oaf, but he succeeded."

Walt Whitman said: "Lowell was not a grower—he was a builder. He built poems: he didn't put in the seed, and water the seed, and send down his sun—letting the rest take care of itself: he measured his poems—kept them within formula."

American poet, critic, and editor, James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1819. He attended Harvard and earned a B.A. but gave up Law for Literature. In 1838 he married Maria White, an abolitionist and liberal, who encouraged him in his work. His poems `A Fable for Critics` (1848), `The Vision of Sir Launfal` (1848), and `The Bigelow Papers` (1848, written in Yankee dialect) brought him notoriety as a poet and critic. In 1855, Lowell became professor of modern languages at Harvard, a position he held until 1876. In addition to teaching, he served as first editor (1857–61) of the Atlantic Monthly and later (1864–72) of the North American Review.