Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was an American poet and educator. His works include “Paul Revere’s Ride”, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was one of the fireside poets from New England. He studied at Bowdoin College and became a professor at Bowdoin and later at Harvard College. His first poetry collections were “Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). He retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing.

 Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality. He was the most popular poet of his day. As a friend wrote, “no other poet was so fully recognized in his lifetime. Many of his poems helped shape the American character and its legacy, particularly with the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride”. He was such an admired figure in the United States during his life that his 70th birthday in 1877 took on the air of a national holiday, with parades, speeches, and the reading of his poetry. Longfellow had become one of the first American celebrities and was popular in Europe. The rapidity with which American readers embraced Longfellow was unparalleled in publishing history in the United States.

 

However, Longfellow’s popularity rapidly declined, beginning shortly after his death and into the 20th century, as academics focused attention on other poets such as Walt Whitman. In the 20th century, literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted: “Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow’s popular rhymings.” Poet Lewis Putnam Turco concluded that “Longfellow was minor and derivative in every way throughout his career…nothing more than a hack imitator of the English Romantics. 

 

Poet Walt Whitman considered him an imitator of European forms but praised his ability to reach a popular audience as “the expressor of common themes - of the little songs of the masses. Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect. Toward the end of his life, contemporaries considered him more of a children’s poet, as many of his readers were children. A reviewer in 1848 accused Longfellow of creating a “goody-two-shoes kind of literature…slipshod, sentimental stories told in the style of the nursery, beginning in nothing and ending in nothing”. However, an editor of the Boston Evening Transcript wrote, “Whatever the miserable envy of trashy criticism may write against Longfellow, one thing is most certain, no American poet is more read”.