Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–82), American poet. In 1836 he began his many influential years of teaching at Harvard.

His prose romance Hyperion (1839), a product of his bereavement after the death of his first wife in 1835, is the tale of a young man who seeks to forget sorrow in travel; Voices of the Night (1839) includes his didactic pieces ‘A Psalm of Life’, ‘Footsteps of Angels’, and ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’; Ballads and Other Poems (1841) contains such well-known pieces as ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ and ‘The Village Blacksmith’. In 1842 he met Dickens in America, and visited him in London later in the same year; on his voyage home he wrote his Poems on Slavery (1842). In 1843 he married Frances Appleton. Subsequent volumes confirmed his reputation in the English-speaking world as second only to that of Tennyson in popularity; these include The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1847); Evangeline (1849); The Song of Hiawatha (1858); and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863, first series; with the rousing ‘Paul Revere's Ride’ and ‘The Song of King Olaf’) follows the form of the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron. An increased sombreness may be seen in his translation of Dante (1867) and his trilogy Christus (1872; incorporating the earlier Golden Legend of 1851), which he considered his masterpiece. Other ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’ followed in 1872 (in Three Books of Song) and in 1874 (in Aftermath). His last volumes, The Masque of Pandora (1875), Ultima Thule (1880), and In the Harbor (1882) contain some poignant autumnal reflections on old age.