The Barefoot Boy

"The Barefoot Boy" is a poem written by American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

[5] Modern scholar Karen L. Kilcup notes that "The Barefoot Boy" confirmed Whittier as a poet interested in idyllic rural life.

[6] Angela Sorby notes the poem is "a late-romantic dialogue between a corrupted adult speaker and his uncorrupted younger self".

[7] Cornelius Conway Felton, a Greek professor at Harvard College, was personally moved by the poem.

As he wrote in a letter to Whittier dated June 26, 1856, "The sensations and memories it called up were delicious as a shower in summer afternoon; and I forgot the intervening years, forgot Latin and Greek — forgot boots and shoes and long-tailed and broad-tailed coats — and revelled again in the days and delights of jacket-hood, torn hat-hood and barefoot-hood.