Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882), was the most widely published and most famous American poet of the 1800’s. His reputation among critics declined sharply after his death, and he had less influence on modern poetry than such other poets of his day as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. However, many of his poems remain among the most familiar in American literature.

Longfellow’s best-known longer works include Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Among his popular shorter poems are “A Psalm of Life,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “My Lost Youth,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and “Excelsior.” Longfellow’s works achieved great popularity in Europe as well as in North and South America. He was the first American writer to be honored in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London.

Longfellow’s life

Early years.

Longfellow was born on Feb. 27, 1807, in Portland, in what is now Maine. The area was then part of Massachusetts. His mother, Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow, was the daughter of Peleg Wadsworth, a Revolutionary War general. Henry’s father, Stephen Longfellow, was a lawyer.

Growing up in Portland, a seaport, gave Longfellow a love of the ocean that would influence his writing throughout his life. A Portland newspaper published Longfellow’s first poem when he was 13.

Longfellow was admitted to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, at age 15. One of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who also became a famous author. While attending Bowdoin, both men decided to pursue careers as writers. In a letter to his father about his employment prospects, Longfellow wrote, “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature.”

Professor and family man.

As a student at Bowdoin College, Longfellow showed his skill at learning other languages. After Longfellow graduated at the age of 18, he was offered a position as the college’s first professor of modern languages. First, however, he agreed to study in Europe, where he mastered French, Spanish, and Italian, and began to learn German.

In the fall of 1829, after more than three years of study, Longfellow returned to Bowdoin to take up his new position. He had to create his own textbooks because the study of modern languages was a new field. Longfellow composed almost no poetry for the next 10 years. Instead, he concentrated on scholarly writing, teaching, translating, and travel writing.

In 1831, Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter. In 1834, he was offered a new position as Smith professor of modern languages at Harvard College (now Harvard University). To prepare himself, Longfellow had to study German literature and language in Europe. In 1835, the couple traveled to England, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, his wife suffered a miscarriage and died shortly afterward in Rotterdam on Nov. 29, 1835.

Longfellow became a professor at Harvard in 1836. Three years earlier, his first book, Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea, began appearing in installments. It was a collection of European travel sketches modeled on The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), by the American author Washington Irving. A second prose work, the partly autobiographical novel Hyperion (1839), also drew on Longfellow’s travels in Europe.

Longfellow’s first volume of poems, Voices of the Night, also appeared in 1839. A second collection of poetry, Ballads and Other Poems (1841), contained several works that helped make Longfellow a leading figure in American poetry. These included “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and “Excelsior.”

In 1842, Longfellow traveled in Europe for six months. After his return, he published Poems on Slavery (1842), which described his opposition to slavery. In the spring of 1843, Frances (Fanny) Appleton accepted Longfellow’s marriage proposal, following a seven-year courtship. The couple were married in July. They had six children and enjoyed 18 years of great happiness.

Since 1837, Longfellow had been a boarder at Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had served as General George Washington’s headquarters during the American Revolution (1775-1783). After Longfellow’s marriage to Frances, her wealthy father bought the house as a wedding gift for the couple. Throughout their marriage, Longfellow and Frances lived in the historic house. As Longfellow’s reputation grew over the years, hundreds of visitors, both famous and unknown, called on the famous poet. The house and grounds now make up the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Author and world celebrity.

Longfellow published his next book of poems, The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, in 1845. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), an epic poem about two lovers separated for many years, established Longfellow as the most popular writer of narrative poetry of his time. He then published his final work of prose fiction, Kavanagh: A Tale (1849), about life in a small New England town.

In 1850, Longfellow published another collection of poems, The Seaside and the Fireside. The title indicates two of the settings that conveyed some of the author’s most characteristic themes, the sea and the family circle. This volume contains “The Building of the Ship,” which draws on Longfellow’s familiarity with shipbuilding in Maine for its primary subject matter. The newly built ship symbolizes the nation, especially in the final stanza, which begins with the lines “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! / Sail on, O Union, strong and great!” A decade later, President Abraham Lincoln was deeply moved by these words.

In 1854, Longfellow left Harvard to devote all of his time to writing poetry. The next seven years were especially productive. Evangeline had revealed Longfellow’s special ability in writing long narrative poems. He returned to this type of work successfully three more times—in The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863, 1872, 1873). Longfellow’s verse was translated into many languages, and he became known throughout the Western world.

Tragedy struck Longfellow again on July 9, 1861. His wife, Frances, accidentally set her dress on fire. She was fatally burned despite Longfellow’s efforts to smother the fire with his hands and a rug. Frances was buried on the 18th anniversary of their marriage. Longfellow was too badly burned and grief-stricken to attend his wife’s funeral.

It was 18 years later and just three years before his own death that Longfellow wrote “The Cross of Snow.” “The Cross of Snow” was a sonnet (14-line poem) about Frances that some critics consider one of Longfellow’s best works:

In the long, sleepless watches of the night, A gentle face—the face of one long dead— Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. Here in this room she died; and soul more white Never through martyrdom of fire was led To its repose; nor can in books be read The legend of a life more benedight. There is a mountain in the distant West That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines Displays a cross of snow upon its side. Such is the cross I wear upon my breast These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

By 1868, when he took another trip abroad, Longfellow was known and praised as one of the greatest American writers. While in England, he received honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, and he was granted private meetings with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Longfellow died in Craigie House on March 24, 1882.

Longfellow’s works

Narrative poems.

In 1847, Longfellow published Evangeline, the first of several major narrative poems. The poem is based on the forced removal of French settlers from Nova Scotia by the British during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Two lovers, Gabriel Lajeunesse and Evangeline Bellefontaine, are separated during the removal. The poem describes the lifelong devotion of Evangeline as she searches for Gabriel for many years, finally finding him in a poorhouse in Philadelphia, as he dies in her arms. The poem played on the then popular appeal of sentimental love stories and of depictions of the American landscape. It quickly became a bestseller and secured Longfellow’s reputation as the leading American poet.

Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855, was the second of his major narrative poems. In this poem, Longfellow wrote a national origin story by re-shaping material taken from Native American folklore and mythology. The Song of Hiawatha focuses on a Native American hero named Hiawatha, whose life, like that of his people, is full of triumphs and tragedies. The epic poem ends with the death of Hiawatha’s wife, Minnehaha, the arrival of white Christian missionaries, and his own symbolic departure into the sunset in his canoe. Longfellow was inspired by the Kalevala, an epic poem from Finland. He composed the poem in trochaic tetrameter, an unusual meter used in the Kalevala. The Song of Hiawatha was enormously popular, creating a literary sensation and inspiring paintings, songs, plays, and parodies.

Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, published in 1858, tells of a love triangle involving Miles Standish, Priscilla Mullins, and John Alden, who were actual figures in the early history of New England. Tales of a Wayside Inn consists of a series of stories in verse told by seven men gathered at an inn in “Sudbury Town” in Massachusetts. The landlord’s tale, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” famously begins, “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Longfellow’s inspiration for Tales of a Wayside Inn came, in part, from his reading of the story sequences in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Translations and lyric poems.

Longfellow translated poetry from many languages throughout his career. His most significant translation, published in 1867, was of Dante Alighieri’s medieval poem the Divine Comedy. Longfellow worked on the translation over a period of several years. A group of writers known as the Dante Club met at Craigie House once a week to offer critical advice on the translation. Many scholars believe Longfellow made the finest translation of the Divine Comedy in the English language at that time. At the end of his life, Longfellow edited Poems of Places (1876-1879), a 31-volume anthology of poetry from around the world. He championed world literature throughout his life and sought to popularize the poetry of foreign languages in America.

During his later years, Longfellow continued to write sensitive lyric poems. Significant lyric poems from this later period in Longfellow’s life include “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls,” “Kéramos,” and many sonnets, including “The Cross of Snow.” Longfellow was one of the finest American sonnet writers of the 1800’s. Many of his famous lyric poems have often been anthologized since they were originally published. Such poems as “The Day Is Done” and “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” have appealed to generations of readers. Several phrases from Longfellow’s lyric poems have become especially famous, including “footprints on the sands of time” from “A Psalm of Life” and “a boy’s will is the wind’s will” from “My Lost Youth.”

Longfellow’s place in literature

To the modern reader, Longfellow’s sentimental and optimistic poetry in regular meters often makes him seem somewhat old-fashioned. In fact, however, he consistently experimented in verse forms from outside the English poetic tradition. He used his extensive knowledge of the literature of other countries as a source for both the form and content of much of his poetry. This added energy to his work and made it more interesting at a time when most poetry had become rather predictable. His works were popular not just in America but throughout the world. The Czech composer Antonín Dvorák claimed that his famous New World Symphony (1893) was inspired by The Song of Hiawatha. Many prominent Latin American writers were enthusiastic readers of Longfellow’s poems.

Longfellow’s lyric and narrative poetry made lasting contributions to the American literary tradition. However, his works have frequently been criticized. During Longfellow’s lifetime, the American writer Margaret Fuller called his work “artificial and imitative,” criticizing him for borrowing ideas from other poets. Yet Longfellow wrote for the common middle-class reader by using a clear, sometimes elegant style that represented popular American values.