Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–82), descendant of a colonial family, was born at Portland, Me., and educated in private schools and at Bowdoin, where he graduated (1825) as a classmate of Hawthorne. His first poem, about John Lovewell, was published in a Portland newspaper (1820). Soon after graduation, he was offered a professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin, on the condition that he prepare himself by studying abroad. Accordingly, he spent the years from 1826 to 1829 in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. While professor and librarian at Bowdoin (1829–35), he contributed essays and sketches to many magazines, and his teaching was so successful that he was recommended by George Ticknor to be his successor in the Smith professorship of French and Spanish at Harvard. To improve his knowledge of languages, Longfellow went abroad in 1835. His wife, to whom he had been married in 1831, died at this time. In 1836 began his 18 years of teaching at Harvard, during which he became a significant figure in the literary and social life of Cambridge.

His first prose work, Outre‐Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1833–34), reminiscent of Irving's Sketch Book, was followed by Hyperion (1839), a semi‐autobiographical romance, interspersed with prose and verse concerned with German romanticism, which had greatly impressed him. Voices of the Night (1839), his first book of poetry, contains “Hymn to the Night,” “A Psalm of Life,” and other poems foreshadowing his later work. Ballads and Other Poems (1841) contains such favorites as “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “Excelsior,” and The Skeleton in Armor, and did more to establish his fame than Poems on Slavery (1842), an outgrowth of his antislavery interests.

In 1843 he married Frances Appleton, the prototype of the heroine of Hyperion, whom he met abroad. Her father, a wealthy cotton‐mill proprietor, presented the couple with Craigie House as a wedding present. Longfellow's life now flowed on placidly in the congenial Cambridge society, which included his brother‐in‐law, T.G. Appleton. Besides the three daughters who figure in his poem “The Children's Hour,” two sons were born of this second marriage.

Meanwhile his fame increased with the publication of The Spanish Student (1843), a poetic drama; The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845), including “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The Bridge,” “The Arrow and the Song,” and The Belfry of Bruges; Evangeline (1847), his narrative poem on the Acadians; Kavanagh (1849), a semi‐autobiographical prose tale; The Seaside and the Fireside (1849), a volume of poems best known for “The Building of the Ship”; The Golden Legend (1851), a dramatic poem on medieval Germany, later incorporated in Christus; and Hiawatha (1855), his celebrated “Indian Edda.” In 1854 he resigned his professorship, which he said was “a great hand laid on all the strings of my lyre, stopping their vibration.”

His popularity throughout the U.S. and Europe was so great that, on the publication of The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), more than 15,000 copies were sold during the first day in Boston and London. His happiness and the even course of his writing were sharply broken, however, when his wife was burned to death (1861). For a long time his grief stopped his creative work, and it was so persistent that it is implicit in The Cross of Snow, written 18 years afterward. The Tales of a Wayside Inn, including “Paul Revere's Ride”, began to appear in book form in 1863, but they were in large part completed before the death of his wife. For solace he turned to his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (published 1865–67), done with the aid of Lowell and C.E. Norton, who met with him every week in the Dante Society that they formed. He added two lengthy pieces to The Golden Legend, which appeared in final form as Christus (1872); added to the Tales of a Wayside Inn; and wrote many sonnets, including a sequence of six, “Divina Commedia,” now considered to be among his most significant work.

During his remaining years, honors were heaped upon him and his home became a shrine for Americans and a point of visit for distinguished foreigners. During a tour of Europe (1868–69), he received degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and was given a private audience by Queen Victoria. His last poems, including “Morituri Salutamus,” were collected in The Masque of Pandora (1875), Kéramos (1878), Ultima Thule (1880), and In the Harbor (1882). After his death, he became the only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

The gentleness, sweetness, and purity for which his poetry was popular during his lifetime were the very qualities that caused the reaction against it after his death. His writings belong to the milder aspects of the romantic movement, and he was strongly influenced by the German romantic lyrists. Throughout his work and his life, he was consistently high‐minded but conventional, and untouched by the religious and social struggles that disturbed his contemporaries, with the exception of his interest in antislavery, for which his friendship with Sumner was partly responsible. He exercised a great influence in bringing European culture to the U.S., and likewise did much to popularize American folk themes abroad, where his work was immensely popular and widely translated. In his own time he was universally respected, except by a very few detractors, such as Poe in his article Longfellow and Other Plagiarists. Even today Poe's criticism cannot be accepted, despite Longfellow's indebtedness to foreign models, e.g. Hiawatha to the meter of the Finnish Kalevala, and The Wreck of the Hesperus to the ballad Sir Patrick Spens. A later age, with different standards, has also accused him of undue didacticism and excessive symbolism, as in A Psalm of Life, Excelsior, The Village Blacksmith, and “My Lost Youth.” The very simplicity that has made him a children's poet has lessened his mature audience, since, despite his great metrical skill, he is lacking in passion and high imagination, and is too decorous, benign, and sweet. More recent serious scholarly interest is indicated by the editing of his Letters (6 vols., 1966–82).