The family soon moved to a house on Congress Street, now known as the Wadsworth Longfellow Home. 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. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1] Born: February 27, 1807Portland, Maine [2]Died: March 24, 1882Cambridge, . [126] At Longfellow's funeral, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "a sweet and beautiful soul". From a New Historicist standpoint Longfellow is classified with others in Fieldss 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. [79] The "Dante Club", as it was called, regularly included William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, as well as other occasional guests. [37], In December 1834, Longfellow received a letter from Josiah Quincy III, president of Harvard College, offering him the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages with the stipulation that he spend a year or so abroad. Today, Longfellow's face and words still appear on a variety of consumer goods. [118] Scholar Bliss Perry suggests that criticizing Longfellow at that time was almost a criminal act equal to "carrying a rifle into a national park". That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. Volumes of selected poems emerged along with reprintings of earlier books and individual poems in varied formats and price ranges. [97], Longfellow often used didacticism in his poetry, but he focused on it less in his later years. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poem Analysis. The New-Yorker called him "one of the very few in our time who has successfully aimed in putting poetry to its best and sweetest uses". In 1854 he resigned his Harvard professorshippartly 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. [80] The full three-volume translation was published in the spring of 1867, but Longfellow continued to revise it. Again, he sought solace by flinging himself into his work. About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (born February 27, 1807, Portland, Massachusetts [now in Maine], U.S.died March 24, 1882, Cambridge, Massachusetts), the most popular American poet in the 19th century, known for such works as The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and Paul Reveres Ride (1863). [34], On September 14, 1831, Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter, a childhood friend from Portland. He graduated from Bowdoin College and became a professor there and, later, at Harvard College after studying in Europe. [89] He had been suffering from peritonitis. My . 10. 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. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists) from what is now Nova Scotia. was offered a professorship at Bowdoin College with the condition that he first spend some time in Europe for further language study. 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 Washingtons headquarters. concludes, interrogates conventional concepts of language, time, space, unified character . Other than being a poet of great repute; Longfellow was also an educationist, who was a professor at his alma mater Bowdoin College and latter at the Harvard College. He stifled the flames with his body, but she was badly burned. [120] John Greenleaf Whittier suggested that it was this massive correspondence which led to Longfellow's death: "My friend Longfellow was driven to death by these incessant demands". 1385 likes. / 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. [93] Typically, he would carefully consider the subject of his poetic ideas for a long time before deciding on the right metrical form for it. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Page I T A L E S OF A WAYSIDE INN BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. [42] Three years later, he was inspired to write the poem "Footsteps of Angels" about her. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others. [16] When Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin, he was ranked fourth in the class and had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. from. 25K. Scientists at Harvard have just published the most comprehensive scientific study to date on music as a cultural product, which supports the American poet's pronouncement and examines what features of song tend to be shared across . Longfellows 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. [125] Longfellow did not respond publicly but, after Poe's death, he wrote: "The harshness of his criticisms I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong". In an age that judged literature largely in moral terms as expressive of an authors personal virtues, Longfellow became a kindly, sympathizing, gently encouraging friend to an everyman reader. Lewiss first love was poetry, and it enabled him to write the prose for which he is remembered. He endured the pain for several days with the help of opium before he died surrounded by family on Friday, March 24. Longfellow's benign poetic temperament owes much to his full and fortunate life. 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. Poetry about the joys and challenges of life post-career. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying. Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo, See All Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Common Core State Standards Text Exemplars, The Life and Poetry of Carolyn Marie Rodgers, with Nina Rodgers Gordon, Andrew Peart, and Srikanth Reddy, Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College, H. W. L. Dana, "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," in, Richard Dilworth Rust, "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," in, Gay Wilson Allen, "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," in his, William Charvat, "Longfellow" and "Longfellow's Income from His Writings, 1840-1852," in his, Robert A. Ferguson, "Longfellow's Political Fears: Civic Authority and the Role of the Artist in, Angus Fletcher, "Whitman and Longfellow: Two Types of the American Poet,", Dana Gioia, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism," in, Clarence Gohdes, "Longfellow and His Authorized British Publishers,", Eric L. Haralson, "Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity,", Kenneth Hovey, "'A Psalm of Life' Reconsidered: The Dialogue of Western Literature and Monologue of Young America,", William Dean Howells, "The Art of Longfellow,", Kent P. Ljungquist, "The 'Little War' and Longfellow's Dilemma: New Documents in the Plagiarism Controversy of 1845,", Joseph Masheck, "Professor Longfellow and the Blacksmith,", Celia Millward and Cecelia Tichi, "Whatever Happened to, Norman Holmes Pearson, "Both Longfellows,", Richard Henry Stoddard, "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," in. His reputation could also benefit from renewed critical respect for sentimentalism, especially as that respect gets extended to male authors. When did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow say music is the universal language of mankind? Family tree of Henry WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although Longfellow introduced a love story in his account of Hiawathas wooing of Minnehaha, their marriage, and her death, for the most part he assembled legends he found in Schoolcrafts 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. Longfellow returned to this theme three years later in his last major prose composition, Kavanagh, A Tale (1849). Scholars generally regard the work as autobiographical, reflecting the translator as an aging artist facing his impending death. [104] Even so, he called for the development of high quality American literature, as did many others during this period. 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 Knickerbockers, 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 poemseven in The Skeleton in Armor, which drew an unexpected link between medieval Scandinavian war songs and New England antiquities. Fill the Goblet Again 12. "[139] Author Nicholas A. Basbanes, in his 2020 book Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, defended Longfellow as "the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history". [99] Much of his poetry imparts cultural and moral values, particularly focused on life being more than material pursuits. 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. Can you blame him? 'When We Two Parted' 8. one of the few truly successful English translations comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of Italian at Harvard and an acclaimed poet. 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), andon the strength of Longfellows translation of a Horace ode that had impressed one of his fathers colleagues among Bowdoin trusteescollege 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. Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, to Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow in Portland, Maine,[1] then a district of Massachusetts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" exemplify this form. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), grew up in the house and went on to become one of the most famous men of his time. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was an attorney and a Harvard graduate active in public affairs. The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery that same year, however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittiers denunciations on the same theme. . [24] He traveled to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, back to France, then to England before returning to the United States in mid-August 1829. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and "Evangeline". 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. 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