Bowdoin College, when Henry and Stephen Longfellow arrived for the fall 1822 term, was a small and isolated school with a traditional curriculum and conservative Congregational leadership. In Germany, Longfellow formed a close friendship with the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, and in England he deepened an earlier acquaintance with Charles Dickens. He also found himself overburdened with instructional tasksintroducing students to the rudiments of various languages and developing teaching materials he could use in classes to replace rote recitation of grammar with literary conversation and translation. The familys domestic bliss, however, was about to be shattered. and cease repining; Behind the cloud is the sun still shining; Thy fate is a common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall." Longfellow is rightrain comes at different times to all of us. [2] He grew up in what is now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. . [121], Contemporaneous writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote to Longfellow in May 1841 of his "fervent admiration which [your] genius has inspired in me" and later called him "unquestionably the best poet in America". [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". [32], He published the travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea in serial form before a book edition was released in 1835. [55] During the courtship, Longfellow frequently walked from Cambridge to the Appleton home in Beacon Hill in Boston by crossing the Boston Bridge. The marriage was an exceptionally happy one for both partners and brought Longfellow the domestic stability he had missed. [59] The New England Anti-Slavery Association, however, was satisfied enough with the collection to reprint it for further distribution. See also the Longfellow entry in DLB 59: American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1800-1850. was also enrolled. [97] The death of his second wife Frances, as biographer Charles Calhoun wrote, deeply affected Longfellow personally but "seemed not to touch his poetry, at least directly". He was honored in March 2007 when the United States Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating him. [140], Over the years, Longfellow's personality has become part of his reputation. Longfellow met Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton and his family in the town of Thun, Switzerland, including his son Thomas Gold Appleton. In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies. On the advice of George Ticknor of Harvard, Longfellow decided to add German to French, Spanish, and Italian. Damaetas 4. Longfellow returned to the United States in 1836 and took up the professorship at Harvard. - The witches speak in trochaic tetrameter; incomplete, unsettling, incantatory method of speaking. / 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. Longfellows immense popularity helped raise the status of poetry in his country, and he played an important part in bringing European cultural traditions to American audiences. His father died in 1849, his brother Stephen in 1850, and his mother in 1851. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he traveled . Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet who used narrative poems to memorialize people and events in American history, including Paul Revere. [83] He is buried with both of his wives at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A revised edition of Hyperion followed in 1869. 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 Revere's Ride" (1863). He also left a loving family and grateful readers who have continued to honor him by erecting statues and naming parks and schools for him, Evangeline, and Hiawatha. Although Paul Reveres Ride and The Birds of Killingworth, the most familiar of these poems today, give an impression of New England focus, the great majority had European settings and sources. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and . [11] He studied at the Portland Academy until age 14. He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England. Its counsel to Act,act in the living Present! and its injunction to be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate gave poetic expression to the motto he had discovered in a German graveyard and translated in the epigraph to Hyperion, A Romance (1839) as Look not mournfully into the Past. He has been presented as a gentle, placid, poetic soul, an image perpetuated by his brother Samuel Longfellow who wrote an early biography which specifically emphasized these points. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa Indian who, after various mythic feats, becomes his peoples leader and marries Minnehaha before departing for the Isles of the Blessed. In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcrafts two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). It was reported that 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish sold in London in a single day. I say she shall! [94] Much of his work is recognized for its melodious musicality. Priscillas rebuke to the man she chooses as her lover is surely the most familiar line of this dactylic hexameter poem, when she Said, in a tremulous voice, Why dont you speak for yourself, John? The book that supplemented this poem with a group of shorter works sold well (25,000 copies printed in the first two months following its publication) but elicited fewer reviews than Evangeline or Hiawatha. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists) from what is now Nova Scotia. [143] He had difficulty coping with the death of his second wife. [dropcap letter="O"]n a fine September morning in 1822 the fast stagecoach from Portland to Brunswick was . Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Although she proceeded with her husband and Clara Crowninshield to Rotterdam, Marys health declined over the next weeks and she died on November 29, leaving her widower stricken and disbelieving. [88] In March 1882, Longfellow went to bed with severe stomach pain. [104] Even so, he called for the development of high quality American literature, as did many others during this period. His reputation could also benefit from renewed critical respect for sentimentalism, especially as that respect gets extended to male authors. Despite some criticism of the Virgilian dactylic hexameter meter with which Longfellow experimented in Evangeline, the poem proved enormously successful. [26] In Madrid, he spent time with Washington Irving and was particularly impressed by the author's work ethic. Death Year: 1882. Longfellow had her body embalmed immediately and placed in a lead coffin inside an oak coffin, which was shipped to Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston. In his years there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin. This collection was Longfellows version of Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales or Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron. . [39] In October 1835, his wife Mary had a miscarriage during the trip, about six months into her pregnancy. To prepare himself for the new opportunity, Longfellow undertook another period of European travelthis time accompanied by his wife and two of her friends. tags: poetry. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807 in Portland, to Stephen and Zilpah Longfellow. 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. [9] His mother encouraged his enthusiasm for reading and learning, introducing him to Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. His son was injured during the war, and he wrote the poem "Christmas Bells", later the basis of the carol I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. How many languages did he speak? 1807-1882 Ranked #33 in the top 500 poets. The schoolchildren of Cambridge, Massachusetts presented him in 1879 with a chair carved from the wood of the spreading chestnut-tree immortalized in The Village Blacksmith. His picture appeared among Our American Poets in classrooms across the United States, thanks to Fieldss success in placing Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in textbooks that established canonical readings for many decades. Each new book extended his fame, and he was bombarded with invitations for literary contributions and for autographs. [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". [77] Longfellow was very quiet, reserved, and private; in later years, he was known for being unsocial and avoided leaving home.[144]. Much of the charm of the poem lies in its evocation of place, from the pastoral Grand-Pr, where Benedict Bellefontaine, Evangelines father, dwelt on his goodly acres, through the bayous of Louisiana, where the Acadian blacksmith Basil Lajeunesse, Gabriels father, achieves new prosperity as a rancher, through the forests of French mission territory at the base of the Ozarks, where Evangeline ventures in seeking Gabriel, all the way to Philadelphia, where the aged heroine finds her lover dying in a hospital for plague victims and where they are buried together. SOLO: Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-neb. 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. Hoffmann, and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)that awakened a new sense of poetry as emotional expression. The poem was extensively reviewed, translated into German by Ferdinand Freiligrath in 1856, and set to music as well as featured in dramatic performances. [42] Three years later, he was inspired to write the poem "Footsteps of Angels" about her. Bowdoin offers Longfellow a professorship of modern languages, provided that he prepare himself for the position with a period of European travel, a proposition he . Many of Longfellows efforts now took dramatic form, although none proved suitable for staging. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is born on 27 February in Portland, Maine, the second of eight children of the lawyer Stephen Longfellow and his wife, Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow. The family soon moved to a house on Congress Street, now known as the Wadsworth Longfellow Home. He's a visual artist and a political activist for the American Indian Movement. [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. He also wrote novels and translated Dante's "Divine Comedy" into English. Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. Hoffmann,Hans Christian Andersen,William Butler Yeats,Henry van Dyke,Leo . Always a writer at heart, when Henry wasn't in school he and his childhood friend, William Browne, planned . Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. [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. But when Henry was a senior at Bowdoin College at 19, the college established a chair of modern languages. Sorrows beset them, however: from Copenhagen, Mary Goddard was summoned home by news of her fathers death; in Amsterdam the ailing Mary Potter Longfellow suffered a miscarriage in October 1835. Chapter 4 / Lesson 6. Although sales of individual later volumes never matched the popularity of his mid-career offerings, Longfellow lived to experience recognition and rewards seldom enjoyed by other writers. 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. The Harvard Classics. PAPERS: The chief repository of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's papers and manuscripts is the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. [97], Longfellow often used didacticism in his poetry, but he focused on it less in his later years. [66] Longfellow published his epic poem Evangeline for the first time a few months later on November 1, 1847. [82] By 1868, Longfellow's annual income was over $48,000. Died on March 24, 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. [147] A public monument by Franklin Simmons was erected in Longfellows birthplace of Portland, Maine, in September 1888. Yet, Longfellow achieved perhaps his greatest popular success with Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, a verse romance the geographic sweep of which across French and English America in the 18th century makes it a virtual epic, although in the sentimental mode and featuring a heroine notable for her humble, loving endurance rather than military prowess. 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. Some years after Longfellows death a violent reaction set in against his verse as critics dismissed his conventional high-minded sentiments and the gentle strain of Romanticism that he had made so popular. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. [13] He boarded with a clergyman for a time before rooming on the third floor[14] in 1823 of what is now known as Winthrop Hall. Answer and Explanation: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had six children. [34], On September 14, 1831, Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter, a childhood friend from Portland. [124] His accusations may have been a publicity stunt to boost readership of the Broadway Journal, for which he was the editor at the time. The framework Longfellow provided, however, allowed his six storytellers (the Landlord, the Student, the Spanish Jew, the Italian, the Musician, and the Theologian) to criticize each others presentations and draw out lessons of tolerance, forgiveness, and faith. 198 likes. [50] Poet John Greenleaf Whittier said that Longfellow's poetry illustrated "the careful moulding by which art attains the graceful ease and chaste simplicity of nature". 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