Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(1807-1882)

Longfellow was and is the most popular poet America has ever produced. Perhaps with the exception of Robert Frost, not one of the great twentieth-century poets in America has ever remotely achieved the status of a "household name." Nor has one of them achieved the kind of recognition implicit in the word popular.

Longfellow's immense popularity—like that of the other Fireside Poets— was based largely on his appeal to an audience hungry for sermons and lessons. That audience wanted assurances that their cherished values would prevail over the new forces of history—such as industrialization— that were threatening to destroy them. In themselves, the values Longfellow endorsed were positive forces in the making of the American character. But his tendency to leave these values unexamined led to poetry that often offered easy comfort at the expense of illumination.

Longfellow's reputation today is based on a handful of poems so familiar that they are part of our national heritage. Americans could no more do without them than they could do without George Washington's cherry tree, Betsy Ross's flag, or Abraham Lincoln's log-cabin birthplace. There was a time when every schoolchild in America knew at least some of these opening lines:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.. - "Paul Revere's Ride"

Under a spreading chestnut tree

The village smithy stands... - "The Village Blacksmith"

I shot an arrow into the air;

It fell to earth, I knew not where... —"The Arrow and the Song"

Born in Portland, Maine, Longfellow was never far in his youth from the splashing waves and rocks of the Atlantic Coast or from the cultural and religious influences of the well-to-do families who lived "north of Boston." After attending Portland Academy, he continued his education at nearby Bowdoin College.

Longfellow's early interest in foreign languages and literature led naturally to an academic career. After three years of additional study in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, he joined the Bowdoin faculty, married, and began to write a volume of prose sketches drawn from his experiences abroad.

During a second European trip in 1835, Longfellow's young wife died of a miscarriage. This death was, as time would tell, a foreshadowing of a second bitter loss. When he returned to America, the young widower moved to Harvard, where he had been appointed professor of French and Spanish. Seven years later, he married Frances Appleton, whom he had met in Europe after his first wife's death. When his father-in-law made him a gift of the Cambridge mansion known as Craigie House, he settled into eighteen years of happily married life.

Longfellow produced some of his most celebrated poetry during this period, much of it based on American legends: Evangeline (1847), the Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). On the first day of publication, this last poem sold 15,000 copies. By 1854, his poetry was bringing him enough income so that he could resign from Harvard to devote himself to writing full time. Seven years later, the second tragedy occurred: Longfellow's second wife died in a fiery accident at home, when a lighted match or hot sealing wax she was using on a letter ignited her summer dress.

Longfellow now devoted himself to his work with a religious and literary zeal. By the end of his long and productive life, he had become for Americans the symbolic figure of The Poet: mild, gray-bearded, haloed with goodness, and living in a world of still untold romance. This is the figure who was given honorary degrees by the universities of Cambridge and Oxford in England and who was received by Queen Victoria. Twelve years after his death, Longfellow's marble image was unveiled in the Poet's Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. He was the first American to be so honored.

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