Longfellow

Longfellow
Julia Margaret Cameron · Public domain · source
Name	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Birth date	February 27, 1807
Birth place	Portland, Maine
Death date	March 24, 1882
Death place	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Occupation	Poet, educator, translator
Notable works	"Evangeline", "The Song of Hiawatha", "Paul Revere's Ride", "Tales of a Wayside Inn"
Spouse	Mary Storer Potter (m. 1831; died 1835), Frances Appleton (m. 1843)

Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a prominent 19th-century American poet, translator, and educator whose narrative poems and lyrical verse achieved widespread popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. He bridged American and European literary cultures through translations and adaptations of Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Leopardi, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe while shaping national identity with works referencing Paul Revere, Native American subjects, and New England history. Longfellow's accessible style and public prominence made him a central figure in antebellum and postbellum literary life, influencing contemporaries and later writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.

Early Life and Education

Born in Portland, Maine in 1807 into a family with mercantile and civic ties, Longfellow was the son of Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah Wadsworth. He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he studied languages and met fellow students who became notable figures in American letters, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce. After graduation he traveled to Europe, studying languages and literature in Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, and he pursued advanced philological studies at the University of Göttingen. These continental experiences fostered his mastery of classical and modern European literatures and informed his later translations and poetic adaptations.

Literary Career

Longfellow began his professional life as an academic, serving on the faculty of Bowdoin College and later as a professor at Harvard University, where he taught modern languages and comparative literature. His early publications included translations and scholarly works that connected him to the transatlantic literary scene dominated by figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. Transitioning from pedagogy to full-time authorship, he published collections that garnered attention across the Anglo-American world and was celebrated by public intellectuals including Edgar Allan Poe (despite Poe's criticism of some contemporaries), Charles Dickens, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Longfellow's career intersected with institutions and events like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the cultural debates surrounding Transcendentalism and national literature.

Major Works

Longfellow's corpus spans epic narrative poems, lyric verse, translations, and popular ballads. "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847) dramatizes the Acadian Expulsion and features characters tied to Nova Scotia and Louisiana history. "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855) drew on indigenous legends and the work of ethnographers like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to craft a metrical tale set around the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. His patriotic lyric "Paul Revere's Ride" (1860) mythologized events of the American Revolution and the midnight ride associated with Paul Revere, while "The Courtship of Miles Standish" and "Tales of a Wayside Inn" adopted medieval and folk frameworks reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott. Longfellow also translated sections of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and incorporated allusions to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in his oeuvre.

Themes and Style

Longfellow's poetry interwove themes of historical memory, cultural identity, domestic life, and moral sentimentality. He frequently evoked New England landscapes—Maine, Massachusetts, and Boston—and colonial-era narratives to explore national origins and civic virtue, referencing figures like Benjamin Franklin and events such as the Revolutionary War. Formally, Longfellow favored balanced meter, clear diction, and narrative clarity, employing ballad stanzas, trochaic meter, and blank verse influenced by Alexander Pope and John Milton. His translations and comparative approach reflected philological interests akin to those of Jacob Grimm and Friedrich Schlegel, while his use of indigenous material invited later debate among ethnographers and critics such as Francis Parkman and Horatio Alger.

Reception and Legacy

During his lifetime Longfellow achieved celebrity status, receiving honors from the French Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, and European monarchs, and he occupied a prominent place in antebellum and postbellum cultural life alongside figures like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (honorary mention prohibited). Critics praised his facility and moral clarity, while others, including members of the Realist movement, attacked perceived sentimentality. Posthumously, his reputation shifted: modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound critiqued Victorian aesthetics, whereas scholars revived interest in his role in shaping American literary nationalism and transatlantic exchange. His influence is traceable in the works of Edmund Clarence Stedman, Henry James, and public commemorations in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine.

Personal Life and Later Years

Longfellow married twice: first to Mary Storer Potter and later to Frances Appleton, whose death after a household fire left a lasting mark on his personal narrative. He suffered hearing loss in middle age and experienced the death of family members amid the Civil War era, which colored poems addressing loss and consolation. Longfellow died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1882 and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaving a legacy preserved in memorials, collected editions, and institutions such as the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site and academic archives at Bowdoin College.

Category:American poets Category:19th-century American writers