Longfellow was America’s most popular poet of his day
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) wrote Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline, teaching at Bowdoin and later Harvard. Musical lyric narratives of myth and legend made him the nation’s favourite verse voice. Domestic catastrophe struck twice and reshaped his later years.
Born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, then Massachusetts’s District of Maine, he descended from early colonists including the Mayflower passengers Richard Warren, William Brewster and John and Priscilla Alden. He started at a dame school at three, was fluent in Latin at Portland Academy, and at fifteen entered Bowdoin College, which his grandfather had helped found, where Nathaniel Hawthorne became a lifelong friend. Before graduating in 1825 he had placed nearly 40 minor poems in newspapers and magazines.
Bowdoin offered him a modern-languages chair on condition he study abroad. From May 1826 he spent three years in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and England at his father’s expense of about $2,604, picking up five languages largely on his own and meeting Washington Irving in Madrid. He first refused the $600 salary as too low, accepting once trustees raised it to $800 plus $100 for running the library.
In 1836 he moved to a Harvard professorship and rented rooms in Craigie House in Cambridge, once George Washington’s headquarters during the Siege of Boston. His first poetry book, Voices of the Night, came in 1839, and Ballads and Other Poems in 1841 carried the instant favourites The Village Blacksmith and The Wreck of the Hesperus. His 1842 Poems on Slavery backed abolition, though he himself joked they were mild enough for a slaveholder to read over breakfast.
Mary Potter, whom he had married in 1831, lost a pregnancy and died in 1835; he then pursued Frances Appleton for years before she accepted him, and in 1861 she died of burns after her dress caught fire, leaving him struggling to write. He was the first American to translate all of Dante’s Divine Comedy, yet critics have faulted his verse as sentimental and too imitative of European models.
Source: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
