Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(1807–1882)

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

(Elegiac Verse)

In “My Lost Youth, ” the most celebrated American poet during the 19th century reminisced about his childhood in Portland, Maine. He recalled imaginative stimuli he experienced growing up in a coastal town: the “fort upon the hill” reminding the boy of frontier fights and the War of 1812; the “Spanish sailors with bearded lips” who awakened curiosity about other countries and languages; the city’s surrounding woodlands and neighboring ocean, which impressed on him a love of nature; and the comfort he found in “the friendships old and the early loves” of what seems to have been a mostly untroubled boyhood. The second son among eight children of Stephen and Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry was born on February 27, 1807, and grew up in Portland’s first brick house. He began school at age three and saw his first poem, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond, ” published in the Portland Gazette in 1820, about the same time he passed his entrance examination for Bowdoin College. Longfellow’s adult writings drew upon influences from his childhood in Maine but also on literatures from distant countries and times. It was an old Lapland song he would invoke as the refrain to “My Lost Youth” even though the education that prepared him for college emphasized classical Greek and Latin.

Bowdoin was a small country college when Henry and his older brother entered as sophomores in 1822, yet his classmates included Franklin Pierce, a future president of the United States, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would reach eminence as a writer of fiction. Literary societies provided opportunities for writing and public speaking and inspired dreams of lives devoted to beauty among collegians responding to early stirrings of romanticism. Both Longfellow and Hawthorne conceived ambitions for literary careers even though there were as yet no models of Americans attaining practical success as authors. Although Longfellow’s father, an attorney, urged him to study law, the young man whose commencement address argued in defense of “Our American Authors” experienced a stroke of good luck when the college offered him a professorship in modern languages if he would spend the next three years in Europe learning French, Spanish, Italian, and German so that he could teach them on his return. While abroad, he met Washington Irving, read in contemporary and traditional literatures, assimilated ideas of German romanticism, and gathered impressions he would later publish in Outre-Mer (1833), a collection of prose sketches influenced by Irving’s Sketch Book.

Back in Maine, Longfellow toiled to develop teaching materials for his classes in Romance languages and German; most of his publications in the early 1830s were textbooks, though he also wrote articles about European literature for the North American Review. Even the poems he wrote in those years were mostly translations of European verse for use with his students. In 1831 he married Mary Potter, a Portland neighbor. When Harvard University offered Longfellow the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages, the young couple left Maine for Europe and another period of study and imaginative development for the aspiring poet. Unfortunately Mary Potter Longfellow suffered a miscarriage in the Netherlands and died in Rotterdam in November 1835. Her grieving widower sought distraction in study and travel. While in Switzerland, Longfellow met the family of Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, and fell in love with Appleton’s daughter Frances, then only 17. Returning to America, Longfellow settled in Cambridge and devoted himself to his duties at Harvard even as he continued a long courtship. This was a fruitful period for Longfellow as a writer. His most ambitious prose work, Hyperion, a Romance, appeared in 1839; it drew on his European travels but offended Fanny by featuring a thinly veiled fictionalization of his pursuit of her. In poetry he concentrated on lyric poems he thought of as “psalms, ” which appeared in Voices of the Night (1839); shortly afterward, Ballads and Other Poems (1842) expanded his reputation with “The Wreck of the Hesperus, ” “The Skeleton in Armor, ” and “The Village Blacksmith, ” among other poems that would remain popular for a century or more. Many of them borrowed European verse forms and traditions and applied them to present American subject matter. In 1842 Longfellow returned to Europe, where he strengthened his acquaintance with authors including Charles Dickens. Perhaps inspired by Dickens’s attacks on societal injustice, Longfellow composed Poems on Slavery (1842) on the return voyage. Although he generally kept personal control of his earnings from publication, Longfellow devoted proceeds from that book to the New England Anti-Slavery Tract Society.

When Longfellow finally married Frances Appleton in July 1843, her father gave the couple as his wedding gift the house on Brattle Street near Harvard where Longfellow had been renting a room. Craigie House had a distinguished history, having been George Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston during the Revolution; after Longfellow made it his home and gradually improved his property, the house became a kind of public landmark known to American readers of that century, who took great interest in the homes and lives of celebrated writers. Longfellow’s many admirers treasured poems like “The Children’s Hour” that reflected the happy family life Henry and Fanny enjoyed with their six children. In those years both that house and their summer home at nearby Nahant were centers of hospitality for European and American guests, many of them authors. Longfellow’s poems appeared regularly in magazines before being collected in The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845) and The Seaside and the Fireside (1850). Meanwhile, he promoted the careers of aspiring poets with two collections, The Waif (1845) and The Estray (1846). The introductory poem for the latter was “Pegasus in Pound, ” which the young Emily Dickinson mentioned in an 1851 letter that expressed the hope that Longfellow’s success conveyed to young writers “who please ourselves with the fancy that we are the only poets, and everyone else is prose ”. Yet, Longfellow maintained his own interest in prose, and his only novel, Kavanagh, a Tale (1849), also attracted Dickinson’s admiration.

Stories could be told delightfully and memorably in poetic form as well as prose, as Longfellow had already shown with his ballads. In this same period of intense literary activity, he turned his ambitions toward book-length verse narrative in Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie (1847). Drawing on a legend reported to him by the Reverend Horace L. Conolly (a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had failed to interest the Salem author in developing this material), Longfellow told of a little-known historical injustice in colonial North America when British authorities drove French settlers from Acadia in Nova Scotia. He focused his story on the wanderings of Evangeline, who becomes separated from her fiancé, Gabriel, when the exiles are loaded indiscriminately onto boats bound for distant destinations after their lands are confiscated and their idyllic village of Grand-Pré burns to the ground. Her search for Gabriel takes her to the bayous of Louisiana and the forests of Michigan, ending in plague-stricken Philadelphia, where Evangeline is finally reunited with Gabriel on his deathbed in a charity hospital. Experimenting with dactylic hexameter (the meter of Greek and Roman epics), Longfellow wove this story of “affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient” into a new kind of American epic that honored a woman’s steadfast courage rather than manly skill in warfare and exposed wrongs done a French Catholic community at a time when virulent anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant hostility raged in his United States. The poem also celebrates American landscapes and the diversity of its communities. Evangeline became highly successful in Europe as well as the United States. Despite critical attacks on his choice of meter, Longfellow enjoyed tremendous popularity as this poem went through hundreds of editions over the next decades. Other lengthy narrative poems celebrating American history and landscapes followed. The Song of Hiawatha (1855) retold legends from Chippewa culture in a distinctive trochaic meter Longfellow borrowed from the Kalevala, a Finnish folk epic. This turned out to be the most marketable poem of the 19th century, outselling even Evangeline; it was adapted, performed, and parodied regularly. The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems (1858) completed this group of long historical narratives with its comic tale of the courtship of Longfellow’s own ancestors, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, in Plymouth Colony’s first winter while suggesting mythic implications for America in the maiden’s choice of the man of letters over the soldier. While writing that story from the New England past, Longfellow started work on two dramatic poems dealing with Puritan persecution of Quakers and suspected witches. These were the “New England Tragedies” that he eventually grouped within a three-part dramatic project known as Christus: A Mystery (1872), whose three sections (devoted to Christ’s time, the Middle Ages, and colonial America) allegorized the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

After resigning his professorship in 1854—partly because he had eye problems but largely because he found he could support his family comfortably by his publications—Longfellow became an increasingly public figure as the wise and beloved American poet. On July 9, 1861, however, disaster struck his family when the poet’s wife died in a tragic accident: Fanny Longfellow incurred fatal burns when her dress caught fi re as she attempted to preserve her daughters’ curls with sealing wax. The poet, who rushed to her rescue, suffered disfiguring facial burns that prevented him from shaving for the rest of his life and required him to wear the full gray beard that characterized his public image. More important, he was left to raise their children and to attempt to recover poetic momentum despite intense personal grief and his country’s disunion. Longfellow’s way of coping with sorrow was to absorb himself in demanding poetic projects. In these years, he wrote collections of narrative poems based on both American and European subjects that appeared in sequential parts of Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863, 1872–73). Even more ambitious was Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1865–67) into English blank verse, a linguistic and artistic challenge for which he enlisted help from James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton as friendly advisers who gathered for weekly readings and critique. The six sonnets Longfellow wrote to preface this three-volume edition speak eloquently of the grief underlying both his and Dante’s art and testify to his belief in poetry’s healing power.

Although neither The Divine Comedy nor Christus proved popular with the general readers for whom Longfellow had made poetry accessible, comforting, and sometimes inspiring, he remained a beloved literary figure in his later life and continued writing and publishing new poems. Meanwhile, collected editions of his work abounded and new books appeared, right up to the aptly named Ultima Thule (1880), the second part of which appeared just after he died of phlebitis in 1882.

The aging Longfellow was received by Queen Victoria and was awarded honorary degrees by both Cambridge and Oxford Universities on his last visit to Europe in 1868–69; at home his portrait hung in classrooms and his poems were memorized by generations of American schoolchildren. He was besieged by visitors and by correspondents writing for autographs. Statues of Longfellow in public parks around the country testify to widespread respect, and he became the only U.S. writer memorialized in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Yet the plummeting of Longfellow’s literary reputation that started in the 20th century marks his career as the phenomenon of a particular point in American literary history when this humane and gentlemanly figure embodied an ideal of poetry as pleasing, readily understood, and kindly instructive. Edgar Allan Poe’s absurd charges of plagiarism against the poet, whose chief offense was his popularity, softened into critical recognition that his ideas tended to be conventional and his stories and forms (however varied) derivative. Longfellow would represent the limitations of “the genteel tradition” in American writing by contrast with original voices like those of Poe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Dickinson. Classified as one of the “fi reside” or “schoolroom” poets along with his friends James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on the basis of their appeal to middle-class families gathered around the fireside to read for a night’s diversion and of their frequent appearance in school curricula, Longfellow retained some influence. Perhaps his most important contribution was in marking out a place for poetry in the United States. One of those who responded to his inspiration was the most popular American poet of the next century. When Robert Frost titled his first book A Boy’s Will for its initial publication in London, he trusted his American and English readers to recall Longfellow’s haunting words, “A boy’s will is the wind’s will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

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