Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (born February 27, 1807,Portland,Massachusetts [now in Maine], U.S.—died March 24, 1882,Cambridge, Massachusetts) was the most popular American poet in the 19th century, known for such works asThe Song of Hiawatha (1855) and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863).

Early life

Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. He graduated fromBowdoin College in 1825. At college he was attracted especially toSir Walter Scott’s romances andWashington Irving’sSketch Book, and his verses appeared in national magazines. He was so fluent in translating that on graduation he was offered a professorship in modern languages provided that he would first study in Europe.

On the Continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused to settle down to aregimen of scholarship at any university. In 1829 he returned to theUnited States to be a professor and librarian at Bowdoin. He wrote and edited textbooks, translatedpoetry and prose, and wrote essays on French, Spanish, andItalian literature, but he felt isolated. When he was offered a professorship atHarvard, with another opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835. On this trip he visited England, Sweden, and the Netherlands. In 1835, saddened by the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1831, he settled at Heidelberg, where he fell under the influence of GermanRomanticism.

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The Song of Hiawatha, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and other poetry

In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous Craigie House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he remarried in 1843. His travel sketches,Outre-Mer (1835), did not succeed. In 1839 he publishedVoices of the Night, which contained the poems “Hymn to the Night,” “The Psalm of Life,” and “The Light of the Stars” and achieved immediate popularity. That same year Longfellow publishedHyperion, aromanticnovel idealizing his European travels. In 1842 hisBallads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” swept the nation. The antislaverysentiments he expressed inPoems on Slavery that same year, however, lacked the humanity and power ofJohn Greenleaf Whittier’s denunciations on the same theme. Longfellow was more at home inEvangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate home in the United States. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists) from what is nowNova Scotia. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying.

Longfellow presided over Harvard’s modern-language program for 18 years and then left teaching in 1854. In 1855, usingHenry Rowe Schoolcraft’s two books on the Indian tribes ofNorth America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epicKalevala as his medium, he fashionedThe Song of Hiawatha (1855). Its appeal to the public was immediate.Hiawatha is anOjibwa Indian who, after various mythic feats, becomes his people’s leader and marries Minnehaha before departing for the Isles of the Blessed. Both the poem and its singsong metre have been frequent objects of parody.

Longfellow’s long poemThe Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) was another great popular success. But the death in 1861 of his second wife, after she accidentally set her dress on fire, plunged him intomelancholy. Driven by the need for spiritual relief, he translatedThe Divine Comedy byDante, producing one of the most notable translations to that time, and wrote six sonnets on Dante that are among his finest poems.

TheTales of a Wayside Inn, modeled roughly onGeoffrey Chaucer’sThe Canterbury Tales and published in 1863, reveals his narrative gift. The first poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” became a national favourite. Written in anapestic tetrameter meant to suggest the galloping of a horse, this folkballad recalls a hero of theAmerican Revolution and his famous “midnight ride” to warn the Americans about the impending British raid on Concord, Massachusetts. Though its account ofRevere’s ride is historically inaccurate, the poem created an Americanlegend. Longfellow published in 1872 what he intended to be his masterpiece,Christus: A Mystery, a trilogy dealing with Christianity from its beginning. He followed this work with two fragmentary dramatic poems, “Judas Maccabaeus” and “Michael Angelo.” But his genius was not dramatic, as he had demonstrated earlier inThe Spanish Student (1843). Long after his death in 1882, however, these neglected later works were seen to contain some of his most effective writing.

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Assessment

During his lifetime Longfellow was loved and admired both at home and abroad. In 1884 he was honoured by the placing of a memorial bust in Poets’ Corner ofWestminster Abbey in London, the first American to be so recognized. Sweetness, gentleness, simplicity, and a romantic vision shaded by melancholy are the characteristic features of Longfellow’s poetry. He possessed great metrical skill, but he failed to capture the American spirit like his great contemporaryWalt Whitman, and his work generally lacked emotional depth and imaginative power. Some years after Longfellow’s death a violent reaction set in against his verse as critics dismissed his conventional high-minded sentiments and the gentle strain of Romanticism that he had made so popular. This harsh criticalassessment, which tried to reduce him to the status of a mere hearthside rhymer, was perhaps as unbalanced as theadulation he had received during his lifetime. Some of Longfellow’s sonnets and other lyrics are still among the finest in American poetry, andHiawatha, “The Wreck of the Hesperus,”Evangeline, and “Paul Revere’s Ride” have become inseparable parts of the American heritage. Longfellow’s immense popularity helped raise the status of poetry in his country, and he played an important part in bringing European cultural traditions to American audiences.