OutfieldHenry Wadsworth Longfellow
Poet
1807-1882
Paradise Pisces
--Van Wyck BrooksOf all the suns of the New England morning, Longfellow was the largest in his golden sweetness.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was America's first professional poet. So successful was Longfellow at earning a living by writing that he was able to resign, at age 47, from his teaching job at Harvard.
Longfellow was praised and honored, in America and in Europe during his lifetime. He was the first American poet to have his bust located at the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
In the 20th Century Longfellow's reputation declined. The reason for this, according to the editors of the Columbia Encyclopedia (6th Edition) is because "many critics have viewed harshly his simple, sentimental, often moralizing verse."
Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe, a Longfellow contemporary, found the Professor too moralistic and didactic.
Longfellow never embraced nor was embraced by any avant-garde, here or elsewhere. Longfellow was a conventional straight arrow. As one commentator wrote, :
Oscar Wilde quipped that Longfellow was a great poet "only for those who do not read poetry."
The reading public prefers the less sober, more pathological Jack Kerouac, another New England writer, active nearly seventy years after Longfellow's death. Kerouac's novel On the Road ranks 639 at Amazon.Com's bookselling website. Longfellow's most popular poem, the narrative "Hiawatha" ranks 81,626. Kerouac's book of poems, Mexico City Blues ranks 77,411 while Longfellow's Selected Poems ranks 232,457. There are nearly a dozen biographies of Kerouac, who died in 1969. A recent biography by Ellis Amburn called Subterranean Kerouac ranks 72,895 at Amazon. A Longfellow biography written by Longfellow's brother, Samuel, has a sales rank of 2,067,204.
Why did the most popular American poet of the 19th century fall from grace in the 20th? Longfellow's intrinsic goal was to create an American mythology, modeled on the Ancient Greeks and Romans. As the Industrial Revolution ploughed the fields asunder, Longfellow gazed in the wrong direction. His appeal was to the past and to tradition. A relatively young nation was hungry and impatient for tradition.
Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, a seaport center in what was then still part of Massachusetts. A descendant of the pilgrims, Longfellow was born into a prosperous, happy and socially prominent family. His father, Stephen, had hoped Henry would follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer. Henry's interest in and success at translating the Roman writer Horace at Bowdoin College (Nathaniel Hawthorne was a classmate), led him to pursue a more literary career when the college offered him a job teaching modern languages.
After graduating from college and in preparation for his new academic responsibilities, Longfellow journeyed to Europe for nearly three years returning to Bowdoin in 1829. He married Mary Storer Potter in 1831 and together they traveled to Europe in 1835. During this second trip across the lake Longfellow studied Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Dutch literature and became influenced by the German Romantic Movement. Tragically, his wife died in Rotterdam from complications associated with a miscarriage. Longfellow's poem "Footsteps of Angels" is about her.
In 1837 Longfellow left Bowdoin and took a job teaching at Harvard in Cambridge, near Boston. In 1839 his first poetry collection Voices in the Night was published. Also published was the prose romance Hyperion. In 1840 Longfellow published his five-act drama The Spanish Student. Commenting on this work, Poe snorts,
In 1842, Longfellow takes his third trip to Europe. Soon after this he marries his second wife, Frances Appleton. Evangeline is published in 1847. Longfellow begins The Song of Hiawatha in 1853, quits his job at Harvard to write full time in 1854 and publishes to great acclaim Hiawatha in 1855. The Courtship of Miles Standish is published in 1858. In 1861, tragedy strikes the second Mrs. Longellow when she suddenly died from burns she received when her clothes go up in flames because of errant wax drippings. Mrs. Longfellow and her daughters were using hot wax to seal hair clippings in envelopes.
Tales of a Wayside Inn appeared in 1863. It included the popular "Paul Revere's Ride." Longfellow worked on a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1867) and in 1868, accompanied by his three daughters, he made his fourth and final visit to Europe. In 1872 he published Christus- A Mystery.
Longfellow's final years were filled with honors. He received honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Great Britain's Queen Victoria invited him to Windsor Castle. He was also selected to be a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of the Spanish Academy.
There are at least three statues or busts of Longfellow in the United States: one in Portland, Maine, another in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a third in Washington, D.C.
Longfellow joined the Cosmic Baseball Association when the Paradise Pisces drafted him during the Rookie Draft of February 11, 1999. This Cosmic Player Plate honors the United States' first professional poet.
Much as we admire the genius of Mr. Longfellow, we are fully sensible of his many errors of affectation and imitation. His artistical skill is great and his ideality high. But his conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong, and this we shall prove at some future day- to our own satisfaction, at least. His didactics are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems- by accident; that is to say when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking- a habit deduced from German study. We do not mean to say that a didactic moral may not be well made the under-current of a poetical thesis; but that it can never be well put so obtrusively forth, as in the majority of his compositions. (E.A. Poe: Reference)
[He] never broke the law, never got drunk, never discharged a firearm nor socked anybody in the jaw in anger, never played cards for money nor speculated on the stock market, never betrayed a friend nor made a pass at another man's wife. (John Derbyshire: Reference)
Upon the whole, we regret that Professor Longfellow has written this work, and feel especially vexed that he has committed himself by its republication. Only when regarded as a mere poem can it be said to have merit of any kind. For in fact it is only when we separate the poem from the drama that the passages we have commended as beautiful can be understood to have beauty. We are not too sure, indeed, that a "dramatic poem" is not a flat contradiction in terms. At all events a man of true genius (and such Mr. L. unquestionably is) has no business with these hybrid and paradoxical compositions. Let a poem be a poem only, let a play be a play and nothing more. As for "The Spanish Student," its thesis is unoriginal; its incidents are antique; its plot is no plot; its characters have no character, in short, it is a little better than a play upon words to style it "A Play" at all. (E. A. Poe: Reference).
Paul Revere's Ride (1863)by Henry Wadsworth LongfellowListen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
It was twelve by the village clock
It was one by the village clock,
It was two by the village clock,
You know the rest. In the books you have read
So through the night rode Paul Revere; |
Longfellow at the Cosmic Baseball Association
 
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