Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The insistent moral tone, sentimentality, and serene idealism of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) made him an extremely popular author at home and abroad in the 19th century.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on Feb. 27, 1807, of an established New England family. He attended Portland Academy and then Bowdoin College, graduating in 1825. He was an excellent student whose skill in languages led the trustees at Bowdoin (of which his father was one) to offer the young graduate a professorship of modern languages. He prepared himself further with study abroad (at his own expense) before undertaking his duties.

Young Writer

During Longfellow's 3 years in Europe his lifelong rapport with Old World civilization was firmly established. He returned home in 1829 and 2 years later married Mary Storer Potter. In 1833 he published Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea, a collection of picturesque travel essays modeled after Washington Irving's Sketch Book.

In 1834 Longfellow accepted a professorship at Harvard but did not take up his duties until 1837, after he had completed a tour of European and Scandinavian countries. During this trip his wife died. While staying at Heidelberg, he came under the spell of the works of the German romantic poet Novalis, whose moody, mystical nocturnalism struck a responsive chord in the grieving Longfellow. On his return to Cambridge he settled in Craigie House.

In 1839 Longfellow published the sentimental prose romance Hyperion and his first volume of poetry, Voices of the Night. In Hyperion he rather indiscreetly told the story of his pursuit of Frances Appleton, whom he had met in Europe soon after his wife's death. In 1843, after a 7-year courtship, they were married. Her father, a wealthy Boston merchant, gave them Craigie House as a wedding present. This house became a famous visiting place for Longfellow's admirers.

Early Poetry

The poem "Hymn to the Night, " in Voices of the Night, conveys Longfellow's debt to Novalis and his romantic kinship with the "calm, majestic presence of the Night." However, "A Psalm of Life, " one of the best-known poems from this first volume, reflects the influence of the famed German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose dynamic philosophy suggested to Longfellow the direction of his rather moralizing and trite hymn to action: "Life is real! Life is earnest!/… Be not like dumb, driven cattle!/Be a hero in the strife." Voices of the Night was well received, and within a few years 43, 000 copies had been sold. Long-fellow's audience as a popular writer was assured.

Longfellow's next volume, Ballads and Other Poems (1842), contained two strong narrative poems, "The Wreck of the Hesperus" and "The Skeleton in Armor, " as well as the sentimental verses "Maidenhood" and "The Rainy Day" ("Into each life some rain must fall, / Some days must be dark and dreary") and the moralizing poem "The Village Blacksmith."

After a trip to Europe in 1842 Longfellow published Poems on Slavery (1842) and The Spanish Student: A Play in Three Acts (1843). In 1845 two volumes of poetry appeared: the anthology The Waif, to which Longfellow contributed the poem "The Day Is Done, " and The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems. Several poems in this second collection reflect Longfellow's deep attachment to the traditions of Old World culture. In addition, this volume contained the popular "The Old Clock on the Stairs, " "The Arrow and the Song, " "The Arsenal at Springfield, " "The Bridge, " and one of his best sonnets, "Mezzo Cammin."

Epic Poems

Longfellow achieved a national reputation with the publication of Evangeline (1847), a highly sentimental narrative poem on the expulsion of the French from Acadia. He wrote Evangeline in dactylic hexameters, a meter which in English tends toward monotony and prosiness. Nevertheless, the book was enthusiastically received. Next came the pedestrian romantic novel Kavanagh (1849) and By the Seaside and the Fireside (1850), which contained the very popular nationalistic poem "The Building of the Ship": "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!/ Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!"

In 1854 Longfellow resigned his Harvard professorship to devote himself to his writing career. A year later he published The Song of Hiawatha, a narrative epic poem on the Native American. For this work Longfellow drew on Henry Schoolcraft's books on the Native American; he borrowed the trochaic meter from a Finnish epic. In short order, he repeated the success of Hiawatha with The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858).

Major Projects in Later Years

Following the tragic death of his second wife in a fire in their home in 1861, Longfellow busied himself with the Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), in which various speakers, sitting around a fireplace, narrate stories. Other tales appeared in 1872 and 1873. He also completed a major project, his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-1867).

In the last phase of his long career, Longfellow worked on another major project, The Christus: A Mystery. Completed in 1872, this work was concerned with" various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages." An earlier work, The Golden Legend (1851), formed part II; part III, The New England Tragedies (1868), dealt with Puritan themes; and, finally, part I, The Divine Tragedy (1871), concerned the life of Christ. Several more volumes of verse were issued before his death on March 24, 1882.

Further Reading

The standard one-volume edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was edited by H. E. Scudder (1893). The standard biography is by the poet's brother, Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence (2 vols., 1886). Another useful biography is Edward Charles Wagenknecht, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: A Full-length Portrait (1955). The first half of Cecil B. Williams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1968), is biographical, and the second half critically examines the prose and poetry.

Important studies of Longfellow are James Taft Hatfield, New Light on Longfellow, with Special Reference to His Relations to Germany (1933); Lawrence Thompson, Young Longfellow, 1807-1843 (1938); and Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (1963). Odell Shepard's introduction to Representative Selections (1934) is excellent, as is Gay Wilson Allen's chapter on Longfellow's poetic techniques in American Prosody (1935). Recommended for general background are Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968). □

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).

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807–82, American poet, b. Portland, Maine, grad. Bowdoin College, 1825. He wrote some of the most popular poems in American literature, in which he created a new body of romantic American legends. Descended from an established New England family, after college he spent the next three years in Europe, preparing himself for a professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin, where he taught from 1829 to 1835. After the death of his young wife in 1835, Longfellow traveled again to Europe, where he met Frances Appleton, who was to become his second wife after a long courtship. She was the model for the heroine of his prose romance, Hyperion (1839). From 1836 to 1854, Longfellow was professor of modern languages at Harvard, and during these years he became one of an intellectual triumvirate that included Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Although a sympathetic and ethical person, Longfellow was uninvolved in the compelling religious and social issues of his time; he did, however, display interest in the abolitionist cause. He achieved great fame with long narrative poems such as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), which included "Paul Revere's Ride." In all of these works he used unusual, "antique" rhythms to weave myths of the American past. His best-known shorter poems include "The Village Blacksmith,""Excelsior,""The Wreck of the Hesperus,""A Psalm of Life," and "A Cross of Snow." Although he was highly praised and successful in his lifetime, Longfellow's literary reputation has declined in the 20th cent. His unorthodox meters, while contributing to the unique effects of his poems, have been much parodied, and many critics have viewed harshly his simple, sentimental, often moralizing verse. Longfellow made a poetic translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1867), for which he wrote a sequence of six outstanding sonnets. After his death, he was the first American whose bust was placed in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by A. Hilen, 4 vol., 1967–72); biographies by his brother, Samuel (3 vol., 1891; repr. 1969), T. W. Higginson (1902, repr. 1973), and N. Arvin (1963); studies by C. B. Williams (1964) and E. C. Wagenknecht (1986).

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–82) US poet. Longfellow's escapist poetry was extremely successful in his lifetime. He is best known for his long narrative poems, such as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), which includes “Paul Revere's Ride”. Influenced by European Romanticism, Longfellow combined archaic rhythms to enliven American mythology. Ballads and Other Poems (1842) contains two of his most popular shorter poems, “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith”.

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