[56] After returning, he published the play The Spanish Student in 1842, reflecting his memories from his time in Spain in the 1820s. Date February 1, 2007. 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. The boys 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 Lovells Pond. A family friends dismissal of the piece as both stiff and derivative may have discouraged Henrys ambition for the time. [41] He was deeply saddened by her death and wrote: "One thought occupies me night and dayShe is dead She is dead! [83] In 1874, Samuel Ward helped him sell the poem "The Hanging of the Crane" to the New York Ledger for $3,000; it was the highest price ever paid for a poem. 8.8.8.8. Many, especially Torquemada and The Saga of King Olaf, were surprisingly violent. Test. [102] He was inspired, for example, by Norse mythology for "The Skeleton in Armor" and by Finnish legends for The Song of Hiawatha.[103]. "[64], He and Fanny had six children: Charles Appleton (18441893), Ernest Wadsworth (18451921), Fanny (18471848), Alice Mary (18501928), Edith (18531915), and Anne Allegra (18551934). [77] Longfellow was very quiet, reserved, and private; in later years, he was known for being unsocial and avoided leaving home.[144]. Full Name: Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 1807-1882. The book spread like wildfire in both the United States and the United Kingdom. His last few years were spent translating the poetry of Michelangelo. 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 Abbeyin fact, he is believed to be the first as his bust was installed there in 1884. The leading poet of the Victorian era, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) contributed to the development of a distinctly American literature. In this essay, the author. The family soon moved to a house on Congress Street, now known as the Wadsworth Longfellow Home. Page III CONTENTS. Despite relatively tepid public response to this effort, Longfellow persevered with The Divine Tragedy (1871), in which he represented Christian hope through dramatization of Christs Passion and its effects on many characters drawn from the Bible. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , Voices of the Night. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. [119] 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. Chapter 4 / Lesson 6. Help . His father died in 1849, his brother Stephen in 1850, and his mother in 1851. I have aimed higher than this". "Resignation" was written as a response to the death of his daughter Fanny in 1848; it does not use first-person pronouns and is instead a generalized poem of mourning. Tributes of many kinds testified to public affectionvisits to Craigie House by prominent literary and political figures and even the emperor of Brazil, public tributes, and escalating requests for autographs. She was in and out of consciousness throughout the night and was administered ether. [133] An editor of the Boston Evening Transcript wrote in 1846, "Whatever the miserable envy of trashy criticism may write against Longfellow, one thing is most certain, no American poet is more read". 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. Now that fiction and cinema have all but replaced poetry as storytelling media, the narrative poems that accounted in large measure for Longfellows appeal to his contemporary readers are represented in anthologies by only a few short examples, such as The Wreck of the Hesperus and Paul Reveres Ridepoems 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. He sailed from New York to Le Havre in May 1826 and spent the next three years rambling through Europes cities and countrysides, absorbing impressions of cultures and places, living with families in Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and developing linguistic fluency. [3] His mother was descended from Richard Warren, a passenger on the Mayflower. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 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). [16] In his senior year, Longfellow wrote to his father about his aspirations: I will not disguise it in the leastthe fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres in itI am almost confident in believing, that if I can ever rise in the world it must be by the exercise of my talents in the wide field of literature. [70], Frances was putting locks of her children's hair into an envelope on July 9, 1861[71] and attempting to seal it with hot sealing wax while Longfellow took a nap. My morning and my evening star of love!" 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. was offered a professorship at Bowdoin College with the condition that he first spend some time in Europe for further language study. Despite the frustrations Longfellow experienced in his new vocation, there was personal happiness. [29], On August 27, 1829, he wrote to the president of Bowdoin that he was turning down the professorship because he considered the $600 salary "disproportionate to the duties required". Snow-Flakes. [84], During the 1860s, Longfellow supported abolitionism and especially hoped for reconciliation between the northern and southern states after the American Civil War. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. A third trip to Europe followed in 1842, when Longfellow took a brief leave of absence from professorial tasks to travel for his health. To aid him in perfecting the translation and reviewing proofs, he invited friends to meetings every Wednesday starting in 1864. [110] In preparing the volume, Longfellow hired Katherine Sherwood Bonner as an amanuensis. [119] In the last two decades of his life, he often received requests for autographs from strangers, which he always sent. M. Brook Taylor, "The Poetry and Prose of History: W. S. Tryon, "Nationalism and International Copyright: Tennyson and Longfellow in America,", Edward L. Tucker, "References in Longfellow's, S. Ullmann, "Composite Metaphors in Longfellow's Poetry,", Hyatt H. Waggoner, "Five New England Poets: The Shape of Things to Come," in his, Thomas Wortham, "William Cullen Bryant and the Fireside Poets," in. He suffered from neuralgia, which caused him constant pain, and he had poor eyesight. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 . He has been criticized for imitating European styles and writing poetry that was too sentimental. Longfellow attended a dame school at the age of three and was enrolled by age six at the private Portland Academy. He spoke at least eight languages well and could . He told her that it was not. [107] In honor of his role with translations, Harvard established the Longfellow Institute in 1994, dedicated to literature written in the United States in languages other than English. [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". [27] Irving encouraged the young Longfellow to pursue writing. In Switzerland, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany he was welcomed and honored. Like . 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. 'When We Two Parted' 8. Deceased on March 24 40. Still committed to the native writers of the United States, he wrote a July 1837 review in praise of Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales (1837) even as he turned his own ambitions back toward the writing of poetry. After falling in love with 17-year-old Frances Appleton, Longfellow returned to Heidelberg to escort Marys friend Clara Crowninshield home to the US. Though its account of Reveres ride is historically inaccurate, the poem created an American legend. [96], As a very private man, Longfellow did not often add autobiographical elements to his poetry. [117] His popularity spread throughout Europe, as well, and his poetry was translated during his lifetime into Italian, French, German, and other languages. on 13 Jul 1843 in Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA; they had the following. Despite some criticism of the Virgilian dactylic hexameter meter with which Longfellow experimented in Evangeline, the poem proved enormously successful. . Near Interlaken he met Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, and continued his journey with Appleton and Appletons charming and accomplished family. During his lifetime Longfellow was loved and admired both at home and abroad. 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. He dug through the past for stories that could could speak to his time, or that could act as cultural containers of collective memory. Haiku. Wiki User. [38] There, he further studied German as well as Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Icelandic. [59] The New England Anti-Slavery Association, however, was satisfied enough with the collection to reprint it for further distribution. This collection was Longfellows version of Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales or Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron. Fill the Goblet Again 12. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. Longfellow returned to the United States in 1836 and took up the professorship at Harvard. His original works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. [136] Many of his works helped shape the American character and its legacy, particularly with the poem "Paul Revere's Ride". Poems such as Paul Reveres 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. [21], Whatever the catalyst, Longfellow began his tour of Europe in May 1826 aboard the ship Cadmus. 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". Wisely improve the Present. [134], Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. . Please select which sections you would like to print: Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. [148], "Henry Wadsworth" redirects here. 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). When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835. [109] Emerson was disappointed and reportedly told Longfellow: "The world is expecting better things of you than this You are wasting time that should be bestowed upon original production". Learn. kbookmyer Plus. Test. Need a transcript of this episode? [94] Much of his work is recognized for its melodious musicality. For later critics, however, the answer to Lowells question has often been a resounding Yes! In the atmosphere of disillusionment attending world warsand especially in Herbert S. Gormans disparaging 1926 biographyLongfellow became an easy scapegoat for everything judged wrong with Puritan, Victorian, Brahmin, genteel, sentimental, and racist evasions of the grim realities of life. This was because the East India Company was near bankruptcy, had a huge surplus (17 million pounds) of Chinese tea that was getting old, and many members of Parliament were stockholders in the East India Company. All day I am weary and sad". In many ways Longfellow may be read as a friend of American multiculturalism even if Hiawatha ultimately exocitizes Native peoples and their culture. But when Henry was a senior at Bowdoin College at 19, the college established a chair of modern languages. Partly because of his publishers zeal for promoting Longfellows poetry, books came in quick succession even at a point in his life when creative efforts flagged. From flurries to relentless storms, why snow makes American poetry American. She helps professionals and business owners speak with confidence - from stepping on stage to speaking on podcasts to showing up online and in the boardroom. Most of us only get one life. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth , D.C.L. 1807-1882. Longfellow was more at home in Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate home in the United States. He was required to live in Cambridge to be close to the campus and, therefore, rented rooms at the Craigie House in the spring of 1837. [77] He worried that he would go insane, begging "not to be sent to an asylum" and noting that he was "inwardly bleeding to death". In the fall of 1822, 15-year-old Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, along with his brother Stephen. Death Year: 1882. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Jimmie Durham(1) Jimmie Duraham is an American artist of Cherokee descent. Both the poem and its singsong metre have been frequent objects of parody. 1864. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. 'I Would I Were a Careless Child' 6. 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. Longfellows 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. 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 1835, saddened by the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1831, he settled at Heidelberg, where he fell under the influence of German Romanticism. He was honored in March 2007 when the United States Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating him. [55] During the courtship, Longfellow frequently walked from Cambridge to the Appleton home in Beacon Hill in Boston by crossing the Boston Bridge. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882) was America's most beloved nineteenth-century poet, . He retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing, and he lived the remainder of his life in the Revolutionary War headquarters of George Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That bridge was replaced in 1906 by a new bridge which was later renamed the Longfellow Bridge. Longfellow was a member of what? LONGFELLOWATBOWDOIN. The Building of the Ship combines a tribute to the master builder who designed the ship with a love story linking the masters 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. The world, he concluded with characteristic serenity, belongs to those who come the last, / They will find hope and strength as we have done.. In 1831, he married Mary Potter, and they went on an extended tour of Europe. He graduated from Bowdoin College and became a professor there and, later, at Harvard College after studying in Europe. [137] 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. [67], On June 14, 1853, Longfellow held a farewell dinner party at his Cambridge home for his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was preparing to move overseas. 1. Learn. I do not believe that I was born for such a lot. Born on February 27 46. The Poet and His Song (1880). Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. I say she shall! [6], Longfellow was descended from English colonists who settled in New England in the early 1600s. 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. Fanny Longfellow took pride in her husbands growing reputation and actively assisted him. Answer and Explanation: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had six children. Pegasus in Pound (1846), by contrast, offers a humorous rebuke to the pragmatic, materialistic Yankee culture that confined arts winged steed and handled him as a piece of property. There is little action in the story as Longfellow tells it: the Acadians submit quietly to British tyranny; Gabriels adventures take place out of sight; and Evangelines quest involves a good deal of travel, admittedly, but no conflict. 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. 'Adieu, Adieu! The trustees raised his salary to $800 with an additional $100 to serve as the college's librarian, a post which required one hour of work per day. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), grew up in the house and went on to become one of the most famous men of his time. About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellows 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. [104] Even so, he called for the development of high quality American literature, as did many others during this period. 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. It comes not back again. 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, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost. About this Poet. [128] He added, "Longfellow was no revolutionarie: never traveled new paths: of course never broke new paths. [60], On May 10, 1843, after seven years, Longfellow received a letter from Fanny Appleton agreeing to marry him. 'S ride '', the poem proved enormously successful the frustrations Longfellow experienced his! Reached almost every literate home in Evangeline, the poem created an American.! 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