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| Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | |
|---|---|
| Name | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poems |
| Caption | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1860 |
| Birth date | February 27, 1807 |
| Death date | March 24, 1882 |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | "Evangeline", "The Song of Hiawatha", "Paul Revere's Ride" |
Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poems occupy a central place in nineteenth-century American literature alongside figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, and they connect to transatlantic networks including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His verse engaged subjects tied to American Revolution, War of 1812, Abenaki people, Acadian expulsion, Finnish epic Kalevala, and European traditions like the English Romanticism circle around Lake District. Longfellow's poems were widely disseminated in periodicals such as the North American Review, Graham's Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and collections published by houses including Ticknor and Fields and Harper & Brothers.
Longfellow's oeuvre ranges from narrative epics like "Evangeline" and "The Song of Hiawatha" to shorter lyrics such as "The Village Blacksmith" and "Paul Revere's Ride", addressing themes of American identity, historical memory, nature, faith, loss and mourning, and cultural translation between Europe and North America. He repeatedly invoked historical episodes like the Acadian Expulsion, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the career of Paul Revere while drawing on sources including the Kalevala, Norwegian folktales, Italian Renaissance texts, and Spanish Golden Age literature. Recurring motifs include the sea as in poems referencing Transatlantic voyages, the hearth seen in vignettes reflecting New England life, and personae tied to indigenous figures such as Hiawatha and to colonial settlers of Acadia.
Major long narratives include "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and the verse drama "The Golden Legend" (1851), published with pamphlets and volumes by Ticknor and Fields and Harper & Brothers alongside miscellaneous lyric collections like "Voices of the Night" (1839), "Ballads and Other Poems" (1841), and "Dante" (1871). Famous shorter poems comprise "Paul Revere's Ride" (published in The Atlantic Monthly and later in collections), "The Village Blacksmith", "A Psalm of Life", "The Courtship of Miles Standish", and translations and adaptations drawn from Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, and the Kalevala. Editions and collected works appeared in anthologies edited by figures such as Charles Eliot Norton, Francis Parkman, and were excerpted in school readers and almanacs distributed by publishers like Houghton Mifflin.
Longfellow employed accessible diction, regular meter, and narrative prosody informed by his training at Bowdoin College and studies in Göttingen University and Cambridge, England, favoring anapestic and trochaic rhythms in works like "The Song of Hiawatha" and employing blank verse and hymnal cadences in "Evangeline" and devotional pieces. He used techniques of translation and adaptation drawn from Heinrich Heine, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Johan Ludvig Runeberg, incorporated American folklore motifs comparable to collections by Francis Parkman and Lewis Henry Morgan, and experimented with ballad stanzas, ottava rima, and irregular metres that reflect the influence of Italian Renaissance narrative practice and English ballad traditions. His rhetorical devices include apostrophe, anaphora, vivid ekphrasis reflecting John James Audubon–era natural history, and patina of moral didacticism with echoes of Unitarianism and the moral poetics of William Ellery Channing.
Contemporary reception ranged from adulation in transatlantic salons and periodicals like The London Times and The Saturday Review to critique from younger poets such as Walt Whitman and critics aligned with T. S. Eliot-era modernism; Longfellow was celebrated by public figures including Abraham Lincoln and commemorated with honors from institutions like Harvard University and civic monuments in Portland, Maine and Cambridge, Massachusetts. His poems shaped school curricula, influenced translators and novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, and informed nationalist narratives used by politicians during debates over Manifest Destiny and Civil War memory. Later reappraisals by scholars associated with New Criticism, American Studies, and Comparative Literature examined his role in shaping nineteenth-century taste, while bibliographers and editors such as Henry A. Beers and Charles Eliot Norton produced critical editions.
Longfellow's narratives inspired operas, musical settings, stage adaptations, and visual arts commissions, influencing composers and librettists linked to Giacomo Puccini-era Italian opera houses and American theatrical producers in New York City and Boston. Illustrators like Winslow Homer and E. B. Tuttle created images for editions, while film and radio dramatizations in the early twentieth century adapted "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha", and civic pageants staged in cities such as New Orleans and Boston drew on his treatments of Acadia and indigenous legends. Monuments, plaques, and museums— including the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site—preserve manuscript materials and ephemera collected by institutions like Library of Congress and Peabody Essex Museum.
1839 — Voices of the Night (first collected poems published in Boston). 1841 — Ballads and Other Poems (includes "The Wreck of the Hesperus"; published by Cummings, Hilliard, and Company). 1847 — Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (issued by Ticknor and Fields). 1850 — The Courtship of Miles Standish (collected narrative poem). 1855 — The Song of Hiawatha (published by Little, Brown and Company). 1863 — Tales of a Wayside Inn (contains "Paul Revere's Ride"; edited in Boston). 1871 — Divine Tragedy and translations including "Dante" (engagement with Dante Alighieri). 1882 — Posthumous collected editions and memorial volumes edited by scholars at Harvard University and publishers such as Houghton Mifflin.
Category:Works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow