36- ] American Literature
Henry Wardsworth Longfellow
Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American
poets of the 19th century. He is the most popular American poet in the 19th
century, known for such works as The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and “Paul Revere’s
Ride” (1863).
Born
on February 27, 1807, in Portland (while Maine was still a part of
Massachusetts), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grew up in the thriving coastal city
he remembered in “My Lost Youth” (1856) for its wharves and woodlands, the
ships and sailors from distant lands who sparked his boyish imagination, and
the historical associations of its old fort and an 1813 offshore naval battle
between American and British brigs. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was an
attorney and a Harvard graduate active in public affairs. His mother, Zilpah
(Wadsworth) Longfellow, was the daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, who had
served in the American Revolution. She named this second son among her eight
children for her brother, Henry Wadsworth, who had died in Tripoli harbor in 1804.
The family occupied the first brick house in Portland, built by the general and
still maintained as a literary shrine to its most famous occupant. Henry began
his schooling at age three, when he and his older brother, Stephen, enrolled in
the first of several private schools in which they prepared for entrance to
Bowdoin College. Aside from a leg injury that nearly resulted in amputation
when he was eight, Henry apparently enjoyed his school friendships and outdoor
recreation both in Portland and at his Grandfather Wadsworth’s new home in
Hiram, Maine. His father’s book collection provided literary models of a
neoclassical sort, and family storytelling acquainted him with New England lore
dating to pilgrim days. The boy’s first publication, appearing in the November
17, 1820 Portland Gazette and signed simply “Henry,” drew on local history for
a melancholy four-quatrain salute to warriors who fell at “The Battle of
Lovell’s Pond.” A family friend’s dismissal of the piece as both “stiff” and
derivative may have discouraged Henry’s ambition for the time. Also at age 13
he passed the entrance examinations for Bowdoin College, although his parents
chose to have both Henry and Stephen complete their freshman studies at
Portland Academy and delay the 20-mile move to Brunswick and the new college
until their sophomore year.
Bowdoin
College, when Henry and Stephen Longfellow arrived for the fall 1822 term, was
a small and isolated school with a traditional curriculum and conservative
Congregational leadership. The stimulus Henry Longfellow found there came less
from classes or the library (open one hour a day and allowing students only
limited borrowing privileges) than from literary societies. Elected to the
Peucinian Society, he mixed with the academically ambitious students of the
college (more serious than his brother or than classmates Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge—all belonging to the Athenean Society). The
book holdings of the Peucinian Society, its formal debates, and its informal Conversations
about contemporary writing and American authors encouraged Henry to direct his
ambition toward literature despite his practical father’s preference for a
career in law or one of the other established professions. Favorable responses
to poems, reviews, sketches, and essays he contributed to the Portland
Advertiser, American Monthly Magazine, and United States Literary Gazette
sparked hopes for editing and writing opportunities that collided against the
materialistic pragmatism of New England culture. Public speaking provided other
outlets for Henry’s artistic and rhetorical skills at Bowdoin: in his Junior
Exhibition performance he anticipated The Song of Hiawatha (1855) by speaking
as a “North American Savage” in a dialogue with an English settler, and his
commencement address argued for redirection of national values in support of
“Our American Authors.”
Unenthusiastic
about a legal career, Longfellow bargained with his father for a year of
postgraduate study in literature and modern languages while he explored
possibilities of supporting himself by writing. Fate, however, intervened to
protect him from the bar. Mrs. James Bowdoin, for whose late husband the
college had been named, contributed $1,000 to endow a professorship in modern
languages (only the fourth in the United States), and—on the strength of
Longfellow’s translation of a Horace ode that had impressed one of his father’s
colleagues among Bowdoin trustees—college authorities offered the position to
the young graduate at his 1825 commencement on the condition that he prepare
for the post by visiting Europe and becoming accomplished in Romance languages.
On the advice of George Ticknor of Harvard, Longfellow decided to add German to
French, Spanish, and Italian. He sailed from New York to Le Havre in May 1826
and spent the next three years rambling through Europe’s cities and
countrysides, absorbing impressions of cultures and places, living with
families in Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and developing linguistic fluency. Before
he settled down in the university town of Göttingen, to which Ticknor had
directed him, Longfellow’s approach to language acquisition was less systematic
than impressionistic and even desultory. His model was Washington Irving, to
whom he was introduced while in Spain, and Longfellow envisaged putting his
experience to Irvingesque literary use. Homesickness, however, prompted him to
develop a proposal for a never published new-world sketchbook featuring New
England settings and stories, rather than any literary account of European
materials; “The Wondrous Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green,” which appeared
in the November 1, 1834 issue of the New Yorker, exemplified his intent for
that projected volume. In Germany, Longfellow settled down to relatively
disciplined study in preparation for his Bowdoin professorship, though his
readings there focused more on Spanish literature than German.
Returning
to Maine in summer 1829, Longfellow as a young professor soon found himself
immersed in the unpoetic routines of pedagogy. Later, he distilled memories of
European wanderings (along with material from his college lectures) into
Outre-Mer; A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea (1833-4) and the anticipatory
“Schoolmaster” pieces he published between 1831 and 1833 in the New-England
Magazine, but not before directing his talents to more practical kinds of
writing.
Back
at Bowdoin in his new role, Longfellow felt stultified in a college atmosphere
so different from what he had experienced at Göttingen and stifled by the
provincial atmosphere of Brunswick. He also found himself overburdened with
instructional tasks—introducing students to the rudiments of various languages
and developing teaching materials he could use in classes to replace rote
recitation of grammar with literary conversation and translation. Most of his
publications for the next few years involved textbooks for students of Spanish,
French, and Italian. Aspiring to scholarly recognition beyond Brunswick,
Longfellow also regularly wrote essays on French, Spanish, and Italian languages
and literatures for the North American Review between 1831 and 1833. Aside from
two Phi Beta Kappa poems—the first at Bowdoin in 1832 and the other the next
year at Harvard—the poetry he was composing consisted chiefly of translations
from Romance languages that he used in his classes and articles. His continuing
concerns about the place of poetry in American culture emerged, however, in his
1832 review essay on a new edition of Sir Philip Sidney‘s “A Defence of
Poetry,” in which Longfellow argued that “the true glory of a nation consists
not in the extent of its territory, the pomp of its forests, the majesty of its
rivers, the height of its mountains, and the beauty of its sky; but in the
extent of its mental power,—the majesty of its intellect,—the height and depth
and purity of its moral nature.”
Despite
the frustrations Longfellow experienced in his new vocation, there was personal
happiness. Shortly after his return from Europe, he began his courtship of Mary
Potter, daughter of Judge Barrett Potter; she was a Portland neighbor who was a
friend of his sister Anne. Longfellow and Mary Potter were married in September
1831. After a period in a boardinghouse near Bowdoin, they set up housekeeping
in Brunswick even as the young husband explored every possible avenue of escape
from that all-too-familiar environment. Longfellow sought diplomatic posts,
considered opening a girls’ school in New York or taking over the Round Hill
School in Northampton, and applied for professorships in Virginia and New York
before release came in the form of an invitation to succeed Ticknor as Smith
Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. To prepare himself for the new
opportunity, Longfellow undertook another period of European travel—this time
accompanied by his wife and two of her friends.
Longfellow’s
goal in this second European journey was to acquaint himself with Scandinavian
languages while strengthening his command of German language and literature.
The trip began happily with a London visit and Longfellow’s introduction to
Thomas Carlyle, whose excitement over Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich
Schiller heightened Longfellow’s interest in German Romanticism. From London
the Longfellow party proceeded to Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Sorrows
beset them, however: from Copenhagen, Mary Goddard was summoned home by news of
her father’s death; in Amsterdam the ailing Mary Potter Longfellow suffered a
miscarriage in October 1835. Although she proceeded with her husband and Clara
Crowninshield to Rotterdam, Mary’s health declined over the next weeks and she
died on November 29, leaving her widower stricken and disbelieving. In his
grief Longfellow moved on to Heidelberg and immersion in German
literature—readings in Goethe, Schiller, Ludwig Uhland, Jean Paul Richter,
E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)—that awakened a new
sense of poetry as emotional expression. In that university town he met William
Cullen Bryant, who had been a major influence on his early poetry and an
inspiring model of American authorship. Restless and sorrowful, Longfellow then
set out alone to travel through the Tyrol and Switzerland. Near Interlaken he
met Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, and continued his journey with
Appleton and Appleton’s charming and accomplished family. After falling in love
with 17-year-old Frances Appleton, Longfellow returned to Heidelberg to escort
Mary’s friend Clara Crowninshield home to the US. There he settled down to his
professorial duties at Harvard, freed from some of the Bowdoin drudgery but
still feeling oppressed by responsibilities to supervise native-language
instructors and provide some basic instruction himself in each of the languages
in the curriculum of the university while preparing lectures on European
literatures.
After
a brief period of boarding on Professors’ Row in Cambridge, Longfellow found
lodging in the Craigie mansion on Brattle Street, occupying the room that had
once been George Washington’s headquarters. Resuming friendship with Fanny and
Mary Appleton and their brother Tom, Longfellow was crushed by Fanny’s
rejection of his 1837 marriage proposal. Again, he sought solace by flinging
himself into his work. He was still writing learned essays for the North
American Review—this time concentrating attention on Teutonic languages,
including Swedish and early English. Still committed to the native writers of
the United States, he wrote a July 1837 review in praise of Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales (1837) even as he turned his own ambitions back toward the writing
of poetry. “A Psalm of Life“ (1838) expresses both the confusion of his
feelings in that time of discouragement and his resolve not to succumb to
mournful passivity. Its counsel to “Act,—act in the living Present!” and its
injunction to “be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate” gave poetic
expression to the motto he had discovered in a German graveyard and translated
in the epigraph to Hyperion, A Romance (1839) as “Look not mournfully into the
Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go
forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.”
Longfellow’s
long poem The 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 into melancholy. Driven by the need for
spiritual relief, he translated The Divine Comedy by Dante, producing one of
the most notable translations to that time, and wrote six sonnets on Dante that
are among his finest poems.
The
Tales of a Wayside Inn, modeled roughly on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The 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 folk ballad recalls a hero of
the American Revolution and his famous “midnight ride” to warn the Americans
about the impending British raid on Concord, Massachusetts. Though its account
of Revere’s ride is historically inaccurate, the poem created an American
legend. 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 in The Spanish Student (1843). Long after his death in 1882, however,
these neglected later works were seen to contain some of his most effective
writing.
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 published
Voices 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 published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his
European travels. In 1842 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such
favourites as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” swept
the nation. The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery that
same year, however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittier’s
denunciations on the same theme. Longfellow was more at home in Evangeline
(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 now Nova Scotia. The lovers,
Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying.He
achieved a level of national and international prominence previously unequaled
in the literary history of the United States and is one of the few American
writers honored in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey—in fact, he is
believed to be the first as his bust was installed there in 1884. Poems such as
“Paul Revere’s Ride,” Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), and “A Psalm of
Life” were mainstays of primary and secondary school curricula, long remembered
by generations of readers who studied them as children. Longfellow’s
achievements in fictional and nonfictional prose, in a striking variety of
poetic forms and modes, and in translation from many European languages
resulted in a remarkably productive and influential literary career. His
celebrity in his own time, however, has yielded to changing literary tastes and
to reactions against the genteel tradition of authorship he represented. Even
if time has proved him something less than the master poet he never claimed to
be, Longfellow made pioneering contributions to American literary life by
exemplifying the possibility of a successful authorial career, by linking
American poetry to European traditions beyond England, and by developing a
surprisingly wide readership for Romantic poetry. Longfellow presided over
Harvard’s modern-language program for 18 years and then left teaching in 1854.
In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s two books on the Indian tribes of North
America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as
his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Its appeal to the public
was immediate. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa 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
most ambitious effort in prose, Hyperion blended the sketchbook attributes of
Outre-Mer with elements of the Romance as Longfellow developed the fictional
persona of Paul Flemming to act out his lingering grief for Mary, rejected love
for Fanny, and poetical aspirations spurred by German authors. The book met
with only modest success while deepening Fanny’s estrangement, sparking
considerable Boston gossip, and drawing mixed but often hostile responses from
reviewers. The failure of its first publisher kept half the first edition of
1,200 copies from distribution, and the eventual readership of the book,
American travelers in Europe, probably discovered Hyperion based on its
author’s later reputation rather than its inherent merits as prose fiction.
More
important, Longfellow turned back to poetry after that second European journey
and found encouragement in the warm reception of a group of poems he classified
loosely as “psalms.” Although he never received any money from Knickerbocker’s,
where several of these poems first appeared, Longfellow discovered an
appreciative public response to the sad wisdom he had distilled from the
disappointments of life; sadness empowered him to speak comforting, encouraging
words to the many readers who responded gratefully to “A Psalm of Life,” “The
Reaper and the Flowers,” “The Light of Stars,” “Footsteps of Angels,” and
“Midnight Mass for the Dying Year.” He collected these and other early poems in
Voices of the Night, like Hyperion published in 1839, and followed up on that success
with Ballads and Other Poems (1842), which featured short narrative poems such
as “The Skeleton in Armor“ and “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” a character sketch
that he thought of as another psalm titled “The Village Blacksmith,” and a poem
of Romantic inspiration, “Excelsior.” He was exploring American subject matter
in many of these poems—even in “The Skeleton in Armor,” which drew an
unexpected link between medieval Scandinavian war songs and New England
antiquities. This period was also one of experimentation in dramatic writing,
although publication of The Spanish Student was delayed until 1843.
A third trip to Europe followed in 1842, when
Longfellow took a brief leave of absence from professorial tasks to travel for
his health. Although the sonnet “Mezzo Cammin,” written toward the end of that
stay in Germany, laments how “Half of my life is gone, and I have let / The
years slip from me and have not fulfilled / The aspiration of my youth, to
build / Some tower of song,” he was entering into a vigorously productive
period of his career. In Germany, Longfellow formed a close friendship with the
poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, and in England he deepened an earlier acquaintance
with Charles Dickens. Inspired by social concerns raised by both writers, Longfellow
devoted the voyage home to writing seven of the eight poems published on his
return as Poems on Slavery (1842). “The Warning,” written last but drawn in
part from his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, concluded this slim volume with the
image of “a poor, blind Samson in this land” capable someday of shaking “the
pillars of this Commonweal, / Till the vast Temple of our liberties / A
shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.” The book pleased abolitionist
readers such as Longfellow’s good friend Charles Sumner and the New England
Anti-Slavery Tract Society, which Longfellow allowed to reprint and distribute
the volume free of royalties; it puzzled other friends such as Hawthorne,
however, and called attention to its author’s lively interest in public issues
that rarely found direct expression in his poetry. Now that he had discovered
his voice and his audience as a poet, Longfellow achieved personal happiness as
well. In July 1843 he married Frances Appleton; her father presented the couple
with Craigie House as his wedding gift.
The
marriage was an exceptionally happy one for both partners and brought
Longfellow the domestic stability he had missed. Six children were born to the
couple—Charles, Ernest, Fanny, Alice, Edith, and Anne Allegra. Both Craigie
House in Cambridge and the beach home in Nahant, Massachusetts, where the
Longfellows summered from the 1850s became centers of hospitality extended to
American and European guests—many of them literary figures—and Longfellow’s
many admirers. Fanny Longfellow took pride in her husband’s growing reputation
and actively assisted him. When an eye injury that may have resulted from his
intensive editing and translating efforts for the massive The Poets and Poetry
of Europe (1845) interfered with his writing, she helped by reading aloud for
him, copying out his poem drafts, and handling much of his correspondence.
Fanny is also credited with directly inspiring two poems that emerged from
their wedding trip— “The Arsenal at Springfield,” the peace poem she requested,
and “The Old Clock on the Stairs“; both poems appeared in The Belfry of Bruges
and Other Poems (1845; copyright 1846). Most poems in the book had appeared
earlier in Graham’s Magazine, which had paid both Longfellow and Bryant the
unprecedented sum of 50 dollars a poem, and had reappeared in an illustrated
edition of Longfellow’s poems published earlier that year by Carey and Hart in
Philadelphia. As the title suggests, the collection included many poems
influenced by his 1842 travels in northern Europe; among them were the title
poem, “Nuremberg,” “The Norman Baron,” “Walter Von Der Vogelweid,” and several
translations. Other poems had local settings—for example, “The Bridge,” which
contrasted Longfellow’s newfound personal peace with the melancholy of his earlier
years in a reflection on the bridge over the Charles River near his home. “To a
Child,” one of the most popular poems of the book, expressed paternal
tenderness toward his first son, while the sonnet “Dante” looked toward a later
stage of literary productivity. Longfellow published two collections of verse
by other poets, The Waif (1845) and The Estray (1846), each preceded by an
original poem relating to the poet and his audience. “The Day Is Done” (1844)
speaks to the comforting quiet offered the weary reader by “some humbler poet”
than the Miltonic and Dantean masters—a poet such as Longfellow found himself
becoming by virtue of the kindly, sympathetic tone that characterized his
popular poems. “Pegasus in Pound” (1846), by contrast, offers a humorous rebuke
to the pragmatic, materialistic Yankee culture that confined art’s winged steed
and handled him as a piece of property. Longfellow returned to this theme three
years later in his last major prose composition, Kavanagh, A Tale (1849).
Although the title character, the liberal-minded young minister of a rural New
England church, is the central figure of a love triangle involving two close
female friends, Cecilia Vaughan and Alice Archer, Longfellow probably took more
interest in the schoolmaster, whose literary ambitions are continually
frustrated by the press of teaching, fatherhood, and demands made on his time
by an aspiring poetess. Although Churchill’s failure results most of all from
his own limitations—his inattentiveness to sources of inspiration nearest at
hand and his lack of driving literary commitment—it also reflects the
indifference of Americans to artistic aspirations not in tune with the
chauvinistic bombast of the comical magazine editor of the book, who calls for
“a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the
earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies.”
Yet,
Longfellow achieved perhaps his greatest popular success with Evangeline, A
Tale of Acadie, a verse romance the geographic sweep of which across French and
English America in the 18th century makes it a virtual epic, although in the
sentimental mode and featuring a heroine notable for her humble, loving
endurance rather than military prowess. The germ of the story reached
Longfellow through the Reverend Horace L. Conolly, who had failed to interest
his friend Hawthorne in developing the legend of Acadian lovers separated on
their intended wedding day by an English edict displacing French Canadian
settlers in order to establish Nova Scotia. Although the original story
involved the maiden’s lifelong search only through New England, Longfellow
extended its geographic range. Much of the charm of the poem lies in its
evocation of place, from the pastoral Grand-Pré, where Benedict Bellefontaine,
Evangeline’s father, “dwelt on his goodly acres,” through the bayous of
Louisiana, where the Acadian blacksmith Basil Lajeunesse, Gabriel’s father,
achieves new prosperity as a rancher, through the forests of French mission
territory at the base of the Ozarks, where Evangeline ventures in seeking
Gabriel, all the way to Philadelphia, where the aged heroine finds her lover
dying in a hospital for plague victims and where they are buried together.
There is little action in the story as Longfellow tells it: the Acadians submit
quietly to British tyranny; Gabriel’s adventures take place out of sight; and
Evangeline’s quest involves a good deal of travel, admittedly, but no conflict.
She serves as a model of “affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient.” The
crucial event of the story is the reunion that almost happens but fails, when
Gabriel’s northward-bound boat passes at night by the one in which Evangeline
and their priest are resting on their journey to his father’s new home. Despite
some criticism of the Virgilian dactylic hexameter meter with which Longfellow
experimented in Evangeline, the poem proved enormously successful. Longfellow
completed his writing on his 40th birthday. The book appeared in late October
and was in its sixth edition by mid-January. Hundreds of editions,
translations, and imitations followed, and Evangeline won admiration in Europe
(from which Longfellow drew some of his sources) as well as the United States.
It was probably the most celebrated American poem of the century.
Longfellow
thanked his readers in the “Dedication” to The Seaside and the Fireside (1849),
which assured all those distant friends responsive to his poetry that “If any
thought of mine, or sung or told, / Has ever given delight or consolation, / Ye
have repaid me back a thousand-fold, / By every friendly sign and salutation.”
As the title indicates, this book maintained a balance between poems of nature
invoking in various ways the poet’s Portland boyhood and oceanic travels and
poems of home life—notably “Resignation,” an elegy for his year-old daughter
Fanny. Both seaside and fireside come together in “The Fire of Drift-Wood,” a
mood piece employing imagery of light and warmth drawn from shipwreck as a
metaphor for intuited estrangement among friends. There were still poems drawn
from Longfellow’s travels and his readings in European literatures, but the
most celebrated poem of the book was among his most patriotic pieces. “The
Building of the Ship“ combines a tribute to the master builder who designed the
ship with a love story linking the master’s daughter to the “fiery youth”
employed in its construction while making clear that the Union stood
allegorically for the United States on the eve of secession. Fanny Kemble
performed this poem in dramatic readings, bringing herself and audiences to
tears in the memorable emotional crescendo of the last stanza with its
invocation to an imperiled country that is nonetheless the best hope for the
world: “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! / Sail on, O UNION, strong and
great!” President Abraham Lincoln, hearing these lines recited in the midst of
the Civil War, is reported to have wept before remarking, “It is a wonderful
gift to be able to stir men like that.”
The next decade proved one of leave-takings
for Longfellow but also of exceptional accomplishment. His father died in 1849,
his brother Stephen in 1850, and his mother in 1851. In 1854 he resigned his
Harvard professorship—partly because of his eyesight, partly for relief from
academic pressures and contention with the university corporation on behalf of
his department, but probably most of all because he found he could support his
household on the strength of his poetry and desired more opportunity for
writing. Each new book extended his fame, and he was bombarded with invitations
for literary contributions and for autographs. A sociable man known for his
graciously winning manners, Longfellow took pleasure in associations with other
literary figures through the Saturday Club, founded about 1855 for monthly dinner
meetings, and the Atlantic Club, which brought together contributors to the
Atlantic Monthly after its launching in 1857.
He
was engaged in ambitious projects. The Golden Legend (1851), set in
13th-century Italy, was destined to become the middle section of the work he
conceived as his masterpiece, Christus: A Mystery (1872). It represented the
medieval phase of Christianity and the virtue of faith (mixed, inevitably, with
superstition) by dramatizing the story of a peasant girl’s willingness to die
so that a prince might be healed of his illness. For this work Longfellow drew
on European sources, chiefly Hartmann von Aue’s Der Arme Heinrich (circa 1191).
Soon afterward, however, he returned to the most American of topics in The Song
of Hiawatha (1855) and to the interest in American indigenous peoples he had
earlier shown at Bowdoin and in “To the Driving Cloud” (1845). Based on
Chippewa (Ojibway) culture and traditions as represented by Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft and John Tanner, on John G. E. Heckewelder’s defense of Delaware
culture, and on Longfellow’s acquaintance with an Ojibway chief who stayed at
his house, the poem also drew on widespread literary and visual representations
of the West to construct what Longfellow called his “Indian Edda.” “Edda” reflects
the Scandinavian influences also evident in this poem, most remarkably in the
unrhymed trochaic meter he borrowed from the Kalevala, a Finnish folk epic
composed by Elias Lönrott. Longfellow’s metric choice, which captures the beat
of a tom-tom, exposed the poem to parody, as did its insistent repetitions and
use of Native American words. But parody did nothing to undermine the success
of the book; even more marketable than Evangeline, Hiawatha sold 50,000 copies
by 1860 and earned 7,000 dollars in royalties in its first decade. The poem was
extensively reviewed, translated into German by Ferdinand Freiligrath in 1856,
and set to music as well as featured in dramatic performances. Although
Longfellow introduced a love story in his account of Hiawatha’s wooing of
Minnehaha, their marriage, and her death, for the most part he assembled
legends he found in Schoolcraft’s many books to exalt his Ojibway hero as a
leader of supernatural birth (son of the West Wind, Mudjekeewis, and of
Wenonah, whose mother, Nokomis, had fallen from the heavens) who leads his
people in ways of peace. Hiawatha introduces his tribe to agriculture through
his encounter with the corn god Mondamin, to transportation by inventing the
birch canoe, and to picture-writing. Through his friendship with Chibiabos the
musician, he encourages the arts; by marrying a Dacotah maiden, he fosters
intertribal peace. At the end of the poem, Hiawatha journeys westward alone
after enjoining his people to welcome European missionaries with their new culture
and Christian faith. The poem exalts and exocitizes Native Americans and
assumes the obliteration of indigenous ways of life.
New
England storytelling traditions also engaged Longfellow’s attention in these
years. He began working on a dramatic poem about Puritan persecution of the
Quakers, which was eventually included in one of the three “New England
Tragedies” within Christus. For immediate publication, in three months
beginning late in 1857 he composed the title poem for The Courtship of Miles Standish
and Other Poems (1858). The most humorous and charming of his longer narrative
poems, “The Courtship of Miles Standish” relates a story already familiar
(especially in Longfellow’s family) about John Alden’s fortunate failure in his
dutiful attempt to woo the maiden he loves on behalf of the widowed captain of
Plymouth, his friend Miles Standish. Priscilla’s rebuke to the man she chooses
as her lover is surely the most familiar line of this dactylic hexameter poem,
when she “Said, in a tremulous voice, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself,
John?’” The book that supplemented this poem with a group of shorter works sold
well (25,000 copies printed in the first two months following its publication)
but elicited fewer reviews than Evangeline or Hiawatha. Of the lyrics
Longfellow composed during that period, “My Lost Youth” is a memorable example
of the poet’s reflection on his personal past. That poem appeared in one of
those assemblages of short poems, identified as “Birds of Passage,” that
Longfellow introduced in The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems and
returned to frequently in subsequent volumes. The most warmly received of such
poems composed in the 1850s, however, was “The Children’s Hour,” which
reflected the poet’s delight in his small daughters.
The
family’s domestic bliss, however, was about to be shattered. On July 9, 1861,
Fanny Longfellow suffered fatal burns when the candle she was using to seal
packets of her daughters’ curls ignited her dress; she died the next day. Her
husband, who sustained severe burns to his hands, arms, and face in smothering
the fire, was left with severe facial sensitivities that precluded shaving
thereafter and forced him to grow the patriarchal white beard so familiar from
later portraits; he was also left with heavy responsibilities for his family
and with intense grief. While coping with private tragedy at home, he suffered
the additional trauma of the Civil War. That ordeal touched his family directly
in late 1862, when Charles Longfellow was wounded while fighting for the Union
army; his father and brother made an anxious trip to Washington to escort him
home.
Again,
Longfellow coped with sorrow by plunging himself into literary work—this time
of an intensely challenging sort. A project already well in hand that he was
able to bring to completion was Tales of a Wayside Inn, the first part of which
appeared in 1863. This collection consisted of narrative poems composed in a
great variety of metric patterns. Although many of the poems had been written
and even published separately beforehand, they were loosely held together in
this book by the fiction of an assemblage of friends entertaining each other by
storytelling at a Sudbury, Massachusetts, inn. This collection was Longfellow’s
version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Giovanni Boccaccio’s
Decameron. Although “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Birds of Killingworth,” the
most familiar of these poems today, give an impression of New England focus,
the great majority had European settings and sources. (Even “The Birds of
Killingworth” was adapted from an English story.) Many, especially “Torquemada”
and “The Saga of King Olaf,” were surprisingly violent. The framework
Longfellow provided, however, allowed his six storytellers (the Landlord, the
Student, the Spanish Jew, the Italian, the Musician, and the Theologian) to
criticize each other’s presentations and draw out lessons of tolerance,
forgiveness, and faith.
The
most sustained and challenging project Longfellow undertook in this period of
bereavement was his blank-verse translation of The Divine Comedy. A translation
of this work had been among his goals when teaching Dante at Harvard, and he
had translated small parts of the poem in the early 1840s. Now he plunged into
work, translating at the rate of a canto a day. For advice, he gathered weekly
evening sessions of his “Dante Club” of writer-scholars—among them James
Russell Lowell, who had succeeded Longfellow as Smith Professor; Charles Eliot
Norton, who eventually published his own prose translation of Dante’s
masterpiece; and William Dean Howells. Longfellow’s translation, still
respected for its linguistic appreciation and literary merit, appeared in an
1865-67 three-volume edition, although he completed the translation in spring
1864. Among the shorter poems of his late career, Longfellow’s sonnets are
especially prized. The “Divina Commedia“ group of six sonnets written between
1864 and 1866 honor the Tuscan poet Dante—most memorably the first, with its
image of the bereaved American poet leaving “my burden at this minster gate, /
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray” in a quest for spiritual peace.
Many
of Longfellow’s efforts now took dramatic form, although none proved suitable
for staging. After translating Dante, he returned to the task he had long
intended as the capstone of his work—the three-part chronicle of Christianity
and its virtues initiated with “The Golden Legend.” The New England Tragedies
—a pairing of “John Endicott” (1857) and “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms”
(1868)—on which he had begun working around the time he composed The Courtship
of Miles Standish, appeared in 1868. In these verse dramas set in Puritan
Massachusetts, Longfellow attempted to bring forward his story into relatively
modern times (post-Reformation) and into the new world, though Quaker
persecutions and the Salem witchcraft frenzy may seem unlikely illustrations of
Christian charity. Despite relatively tepid public response to this effort,
Longfellow persevered with The Divine Tragedy (1871), in which he represented
Christian hope through dramatization of Christ’s Passion and its effects on
many characters drawn from the Bible. Sales of this book improved upon those
for its predecessor; yet, Longfellow was disappointed by reader indifference to
the work he had identified in an 1849 letter as “the sublimer Song whose broken
melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul.” When all three parts
finally came together in Christus: A Mystery, book sales were slight (only
6,000 copies printed) and critical response even less heartening. Longfellow
himself may have recognized that the sections did not cohere and that the
historical sequence ended in anticlimax; he thought of adding another drama on
the Moravians of Bethlehem to show the positive influence of the Gospel, but he
never carried out his intention. He moved ahead to new dramatic poems, notably
“Judas Maccabeus” in Three Books of Song (1872) and The Masque of Pandora
(1875); Michael Angelo, his last major poem, appeared posthumously in 1883 in its
unfinished condition.
Partly
because of his publishers’ zeal for promoting Longfellow’s poetry, books came
in quick succession even at a point in his life when creative efforts flagged.
Volumes of selected poems emerged along with reprintings of earlier books and
individual poems in varied formats and price ranges. Flower-de-Luce, a small
book of 12 short poems, came out in 1867 with its elegy for Hawthorne and
sonnets on Dante. A revised edition of Hyperion followed in 1869. In 1872 Three
Books of Song presented the second part of “Tales of a Wayside Inn” along with
“Judas Maccabeus” and a group of translations. The next year Aftermath was
published, with its moving title poem and the final collection of “Tales of a
Wayside Inn.” The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875) included “Morituri
Salutamus” (We who Are about to Die Salute You, 1874), one of his few
occasional poems. Written for the 15th reunion of his Bowdoin College class, it
is a memorable reflection on aging and is Longfellow’s most admired ode. That
book also featured “The Hanging of the Crane” (1874), which had been
Longfellow’s most remunerative poem when The New York Ledger paid him 3,000
dollars for its serial publication earlier that same year. Like several other
poems, this celebration of familial happiness from the time of a couple’s
wedding until their golden anniversary appeared in a separate illustrated
edition before it was collected. Kéramos and Other Poems appeared in 1878 with
a title poem that linked Longfellow’s boyhood interest in Portland pottery with
his later travels and readings to present a particularly effective statement of
his poetics. Ultima Thule (1880), the title of which signaled his expectation
that it would be his last collection, featured such lyrics as “The Tide Rises,
The Tide Falls” (1879) and “L’Envoi. The Poet and His Song” (1880). The volume
In the Harbor, Ultima Thule—Part 2 came out just after his death in 1882 and
included his final composition, “The Bells of San Blas“ (1882). At least as
wearing as his original authorship in late years was a massive editorial and
translation project he undertook for his publisher, James T. Fields; Poems of
Places emerged in 31 volumes between 1876 and 1879.
Although sales of individual later volumes
never matched the popularity of his mid-career offerings, Longfellow lived to
experience recognition and rewards seldom enjoyed by other writers. Tributes of
many kinds testified to public affection—visits to Craigie House by prominent
literary and political figures and even the emperor of Brazil, public tributes,
and escalating requests for autographs. His 1868-1869 final visit to Europe, on
which he was attended by a large family party, turned into a triumphal
progression framed by honorary degrees awarded by Cambridge and Oxford
universities. Queen Victoria received Longfellow at Windsor Castle; the Prince
of Wales invited him as a guest; and he visited with William Gladstone, John
Russell, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Switzerland, France, Italy, Austria, and
Germany he was welcomed and honored. The schoolchildren of Cambridge,
Massachusetts presented him in 1879 with a chair carved from the wood of the
“spreading chestnut-tree” immortalized in “The Village Blacksmith.” His picture
appeared among “Our American Poets” in classrooms across the United States,
thanks to Fields’s success in placing Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John
Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in
textbooks that established canonical readings for many decades. Financial rewards
confirmed Longfellow’s youthful hope that an American could make a living
through literature, although, as William Charvat says, Longfellow’s income
derived as much from his prose as from his poetry. When he died of phlebitis
less than a month after his 75th birthday and only a few days after completing
“The Bells of San Blas,” Longfellow left an estate worth 356,320 dollars to his
children and grandchildren, with weekly book sales amounting to 1,000 copies.
He also left a loving family and grateful readers who have continued to honor
him by erecting statues and naming parks and schools for him, Evangeline, and
Hiawatha.
Longfellow’s celebrity as the preeminent poet
of America assured him critical respect in the closing decades of the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th; yet, commentators even then recognized
his limitations. While readily dismissing Edgar Allan Poe’s charges of
plagiarism, they acknowledged that Longfellow lacked the originality evident in
Whitman, Emerson, and even Poe. Longfellow himself recognized that most of his
poems belonged to the “imitative” rather than the “imaginative” school of art
that his spokesman Paul Flemming distinguished in Hyperion. Longfellow’s
imitativeness differed significantly from that of many contemporaries, however,
in that he early outgrew his tendency to echo Bryant’s style or that of English
Romantic poets and turned instead to German Romanticism, which he virtually
introduced into American poetry, and to traditions of European verse from many
countries and eras. Richard Henry Stoddard summed up Longfellow’s contribution
in an 1881 essay, pointing out how Longfellow remained “true to himself” and to
his scholarly impulses by creating and satisfying “a taste for a literature
which did not exist in this country until he began to write.” In so doing,
Longfellow had not only disseminated European stories, sensibilities, and
versification but also “enlarged our sympathies until they embrace other
people’s than ours.” Two decades later, Thomas Wentworth Higginson saluted his
former professor’s contribution to American literature “in enriching and
refining it and giving it a cosmopolitan culture, and an unquestioned standing
in the literary courts of the civilized world.”
Longfellow
gave poetry higher standing within American society than it had enjoyed ever
before, not only by exemplifying the appeal of graceful, informed writing to an
exceptionally wide reading audience but also by making art itself one of his
themes. In poems throughout his career, he represented persons of all times,
cultures, and states of life as turning to creative expression (music, song,
poetry, storytelling, and pottery) for entertainment and reassurance. In turn,
he received homage from practitioners of other arts: composers set many of his
poems to music, and artists illustrated many of his scenes. As he had honored
European poets by translating their work into English, he lived to see his own
poems translated into 24 languages. Longfellow laid the groundwork for other
authorial careers by persuading readers of the importance of art as well as by
demonstrating how literature could be turned into a paying proposition in a
country known for material ambition. According to Charvat, “by shrewd,
aggressive, and intelligent management of the business of writing, he raised
the commercial value of verse and thereby helped other American poets to get
out of the garret.”
In
an age that judged literature largely in moral terms as expressive of an
author’s personal virtues, Longfellow became a kindly, sympathizing, gently
encouraging friend to an “everyman” reader. According to Howells, Longfellow’s
power derived from his “courage in frankly trusting the personal as the
universal” along with his unaffectedness, the simplicity of his feelings, and
the sincerity of his expression. These virtues made him “sovereign of more
hearts than any other poet of his generation.” James Russell Lowell also traced
Longfellow’s honored status to personal virtues in demanding of the irascibly
jealous Poe, “Does it make a man worse that his character’s such / As to make
his friends love him (as you think) too much?”
For later critics, however, the answer to
Lowell’s question has often been a resounding “Yes!” In the atmosphere of
disillusionment attending world wars—and especially in Herbert S. Gorman’s
disparaging 1926 biography—Longfellow became an easy scapegoat for everything
judged wrong with Puritan, Victorian, Brahmin, genteel, sentimental, and racist
evasions of the grim realities of life. The moralism of his poetry came to seem
offensive and even ridiculous as critics attacked his mixed metaphors as
evidence of muddled thinking. The dominance of free verse fostered contempt for
Longfellow’s songlike versification and an indifference to its experimental
qualities. New Critics looked for ironies, ambiguities, and complexities not
discoverable in Longfellow’s work and rejected the didactic conclusions he
typically tacked onto his poems. Hyatt Waggoner observed the irony of
Longfellow’s having been most appreciated in his own time for “A Psalm of
Life,” noting that “though it intends to mean that life is worth living after
all, what it effectively does mean is that life must be worth living but the
poet can’t think why.”
From a New Historicist standpoint Longfellow
is classified with others in Fields’s Houghton-Mifflin stable as one of those
authors used to impose a presumed “high culture” of English Puritan origins on
subsequent generations and immigrant populations, even though Longfellow might
also be recognized as one whose broadly inclusive responsiveness to European
traditions could have smoothed assimilation for the children of newcomers from
central and southern Europe. In many ways Longfellow may be read as a friend of
American multiculturalism even if Hiawatha ultimately exocitizes Native peoples
and their culture. His reputation could also benefit from renewed critical
respect for sentimentalism, especially as that respect gets extended to male
authors.
At present, however, Longfellow has been
relegated to the status of an historically interesting minor poet whose poems
occupy only a few pages in recent anthologies and do so in ways that obscure
the reasons for his original popularity. Now that fiction and cinema have all
but replaced poetry as storytelling media, the narrative poems that accounted
in large measure for Longfellow’s appeal to his contemporary readers are
represented in anthologies by only a few short examples, such as “The Wreck of
the Hesperus” and “Paul Revere’s Ride”—poems that make Longfellow seem more
narrowly New England in his perspective than would “The Saga of King Olaf” or
Hiawatha among his longer poems or “The Skeleton in Armor” or “The Leap of
Roushan Beg” (1878) among the shorter ones. Whereas 19th-century readers had
savored the sentimental charms of “The Children’s Hour,” readers of today look
for personal confessions of a sort Longfellow held in reserve; two sonnets
particularly admired today for their courageous yet artistically controlled
revelations of personal pain, “Mezzo Cammin” and “The Cross of Snow” (composed
1879), both appeared posthumously. In his own time one of Longfellow’s chief
contributions to American literature was the encouragement he offered to
aspiring writers—whether those Boston-Cambridge-Concord literati with whom he
interacted through his various clubs or those such as Emily Dickinson, who
responded gratefully to him from a distance as the champion of poetry in an
otherwise prosaic American society, the Pegasus in the pound of Yankee
bookstores. 20th-century poets such as Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, and Howard
Nemerov have been kinder to Longfellow than literary critics and historians.
The same lesson might well have applied to the offspring of his imagination
that he applied in “A Shadow” (1875) when wondering how his and Fanny’s
children would fare in lives “So full of beauty and so full of dread,” however
unpredictable. “The world,” he concluded with characteristic serenity, “belongs
to those who come the last, / They will find hope and strength as we have done.”
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 of
Westminster 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 contemporary
Walt 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 critical
assessment, which tried to reduce him to the status of a mere hearthside
rhymer, was perhaps as unbalanced as the adulation he had received during his
lifetime. Some of Longfellow’s sonnets and other lyrics are still among the finest
in American poetry, and Hiawatha, “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.
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