Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 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 . Previous boarders included Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, and Joseph Emerson Worcester. The visitor then asked if he had died here. [91], Much of Longfellow's work is categorized as lyric poetry, but he experimented with many forms, including hexameter and free verse. [118] Scholar Bliss Perry suggests that criticizing Longfellow at that time was almost a criminal act equal to "carrying a rifle into a national park". 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. [120] John Greenleaf Whittier suggested that it was this massive correspondence which led to Longfellow's death: "My friend Longfellow was driven to death by these incessant demands". Although the title character, the liberal-minded young minister of a rural New England church, is the central figure of a love triangle involving two close female friends, Cecilia Vaughan and Alice Archer, Longfellow probably took more interest in the schoolmaster, whose literary ambitions are continually frustrated by the press of teaching, fatherhood, and demands made on his time by an aspiring poetess. Page II Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Fate, however, intervened to protect him from the bar. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and . Longfellow began publishing his poetry in 1839, including the collection Voices of the Night, his debut book of poetry. 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. During his lifetime Longfellow was loved and admired both at home and abroad. In turn, he received homage from practitioners of other arts: composers set many of his poems to music, and artists illustrated many of his scenes. 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. [104] Even so, he called for the development of high quality American literature, as did many others during this period. About this Poet. I have aimed higher than this". [88] In March 1882, Longfellow went to bed with severe stomach pain. The dominance of free verse fostered contempt for Longfellows songlike versification and an indifference to its experimental qualities. Poetry about the joys and challenges of life post-career. was offered a professorship at Bowdoin College with the condition that he first spend some time in Europe for further language study. Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. Longfellow and Mary Potter were married in September 1831. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1] Born: February 27, 1807Portland, Maine [2]Died: March 24, 1882Cambridge, . 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. After a period in a boardinghouse near Bowdoin, they set up housekeeping in Brunswick even as the young husband explored every possible avenue of escape from that all-too-familiar environment. [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". [83] He is buried with both of his wives at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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. This collection consisted of narrative poems composed in a great variety of metric patterns. Both Craigie House in Cambridge and the beach home in Nahant, Massachusetts, where the Longfellows summered from the 1850s became centers of hospitality extended to American and European guestsmany of them literary figuresand Longfellows many admirers. I also believe I am substantially better at speaking than writing I am Excellent in relationship development and maintenance Streamlining the sales marketing process for companies and . A Psalm of Life (1838) expresses both the confusion of his feelings in that time of discouragement and his resolve not to succumb to mournful passivity. Although the sonnet Mezzo Cammin, written toward the end of that stay in Germany, laments how Half of my life is gone, and I have let / The years slip from me and have not fulfilled / The aspiration of my youth, to build / Some tower of song, he was entering into a vigorously productive period of his career. [51] Longfellow was well liked as a professor, but he disliked being "constantly a playmate for boys" rather than "stretching out and grappling with men's minds."[52]. That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In 1836, Longfellow moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach foreign languages at Harvard College. Sales of this book improved upon those for its predecessor; yet, Longfellow was disappointed by reader indifference to the work he had identified in an 1849 letter as the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul. When all three parts finally came together in Christus: A Mystery, book sales were slight (only 6,000 copies printed) and critical response even less heartening. 'Well! Longfellow was a member of what? [9] His mother encouraged his enthusiasm for reading and learning, introducing him to Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. Returning to Maine in summer 1829, Longfellow as a young professor soon found himself immersed in the unpoetic routines of pedagogy. Terms in this set (45) What where the years Longfellow was alive? 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. / 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. Homesickness, however, prompted him to develop a proposal for a never published new-world sketchbook featuring New England settings and stories, rather than any literary account of European materials; The Wondrous Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green, which appeared in the November 1, 1834 issue of the New Yorker, exemplified his intent for that projected volume. Longfellow published two collections of verse by other poets, The Waif (1845) and The Estray (1846), each preceded by an original poem relating to the poet and his audience. 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. Again, he sought solace by flinging himself into his work. Jimmie Durham(1) Jimmie Duraham is an American artist of Cherokee descent. She was in and out of consciousness throughout the night and was administered ether. The Day Is Done (1844) speaks to the comforting quiet offered the weary reader by some humbler poet than the Miltonic and Dantean mastersa poet such as Longfellow found himself becoming by virtue of the kindly, sympathetic tone that characterized his popular poems. His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). [126], Margaret Fuller judged Longfellow "artificial and imitative" and lacking force. Two notable exceptions are dedicated to the death of members of his family. Most of us only get one life. In 1842 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, swept the nation. In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the poems Hymn to the Night, The Psalm of Life, and The Light of the Stars and achieved immediate popularity. tags: poetry. 'When We Two Parted' 8. [99] Much of his poetry imparts cultural and moral values, particularly focused on life being more than material pursuits. In this essay, the author. Born Henry WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a world renowned poet primarily known for his poem "The Courtship of Miles Standish," lived through many depressing situations. The world, he concluded with characteristic serenity, belongs to those who come the last, / They will find hope and strength as we have done.. PAPERS: The chief repository of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's papers and manuscripts is the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Longfellow returned to the United States in 1836 and took up the professorship at Harvard. was born at Portland, Maine, Feb. 27, 1807, and graduated at Bowdoin College, 1825. A haiku is a three-line poetic form originating in Japan. His works are still regularly anthologised after nearly a century and a half. 1807-1882. The marriage was an exceptionally happy one for both partners and brought Longfellow the domestic stability he had missed. Need a transcript of this episode? Driven by the need for spiritual relief, he translated The Divine Comedy by Dante, producing one of the most notable translations to that time, and wrote six sonnets on Dante that are among his finest poems. 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. A third trip to Europe followed in 1842, when Longfellow took a brief leave of absence from professorial tasks to travel for his health. From flurries to relentless storms, why snow makes American poetry American. Sweetness, gentleness, simplicity, and a romantic vision shaded by melancholy are the characteristic features of Longfellows poetry. In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous Craigie House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he remarried in 1843. His fathers book collection provided literary models of a neoclassical sort, and family storytelling acquainted him with New England lore dating to pilgrim days. Though its account of Reveres ride is historically inaccurate, the poem created an American legend. 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. Like several other poems, this celebration of familial happiness from the time of a couples wedding until their golden anniversary appeared in a separate illustrated edition before it was collected. Of the lyrics Longfellow composed during that period, My Lost Youth is a memorable example of the poets reflection on his personal past. Longfellows goal in this second European journey was to acquaint himself with Scandinavian languages while strengthening his command of German language and literature. Haiku. Mrs. How many languages did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow speak? was also enrolled. He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. 4 In 1773, Parliament passed a law giving the English East India Company exclusive right to sell tea in America. 'Adieu, Adieu! BOSTON: TICKNOR AND FIELDS. In his years there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin. [54] His friend George Stillman Hillard encouraged him in the pursuit: "I delight to see you keeping up so stout a heart for the resolve to conquer is half the battle in love as well as war". See answer (1) Copy. The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery that same year, however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittiers denunciations on the same theme. "[138] Twentieth-century poet Lewis Putnam Turco concluded that "Longfellow was minor and derivative in every way throughout his career nothing more than a hack imitator of the English Romantics. 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. Although the original story involved the maidens lifelong search only through New England, Longfellow extended its geographic range. The germ of the story reached Longfellow through the Reverend Horace L. Conolly, who had failed to interest his friend Hawthorne in developing the legend of Acadian lovers separated on their intended wedding day by an English edict displacing French Canadian settlers in order to establish Nova Scotia. [32], He published the travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea in serial form before a book edition was released in 1835. [100] He often used allegory in his work. Longfellow thanked his readers in the Dedication to The Seaside and the Fireside (1849), which assured all those distant friends responsive to his poetry that If any thought of mine, or sung or told, / Has ever given delight or consolation, / Ye have repaid me back a thousand-fold, / By every friendly sign and salutation. As the title indicates, this book maintained a balance between poems of nature invoking in various ways the poets Portland boyhood and oceanic travels and poems of home lifenotably Resignation, an elegy for his year-old daughter Fanny. The volume In the Harbor, Ultima ThulePart 2 came out just after his death in 1882 and included his final composition, The Bells of San Blas (1882). [72] Her dress suddenly caught fire, but it is unclear exactly how;[73] burning wax or a lighted candle may have fallen onto it. "End of Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." There should be 5 seconds silence at the end of the recording, or 10 seconds for files longer than 30 minutes. Longfellow completed his writing on his 40th birthday. He wrote to friend Charles Sumner: "I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart". [66] His literary income was increasing considerably; in 1840, he had made $219 from his work, but 1850 brought him $1,900. 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. Early on young Henry knew he wanted to be a poet . [110] In preparing the volume, Longfellow hired Katherine Sherwood Bonner as an amanuensis. [50] The Southern Literary Messenger immediately put Longfellow "among the first of our American poets". Life and Fame. Deceased on March 24 40. His celebrity in his own time, however, has yielded to changing literary tastes and to reactions against the genteel tradition of authorship he represented. She died shortly after 10 the next morning, July 10, after requesting a cup of coffee. [30] During his years teaching at the college, he translated textbooks from French, Italian, and Spanish;[31] his first published book was a translation of the poetry of medieval Spanish poet Jorge Manrique in 1833. Aside from two Phi Beta Kappa poemsthe first at Bowdoin in 1832 and the other the next year at Harvardthe poetry he was composing consisted chiefly of translations from Romance languages that he used in his classes and articles. [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. Date February 1, 2007. "[129] Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect. The book met with only modest success while deepening Fannys estrangement, sparking considerable Boston gossip, and drawing mixed but often hostile responses from reviewers. The family soon moved to a house on Congress Street, now known as the Wadsworth Longfellow Home. Although many of the poems had been written and even published separately beforehand, they were loosely held together in this book by the fiction of an assemblage of friends entertaining each other by storytelling at a Sudbury, Massachusetts, inn. from. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. Longfellow's benign poetic temperament owes much to his full and fortunate life. The famed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once penned the beautiful words, "Be still, sad heart! To a Lady 5. [80] The full three-volume translation was published in the spring of 1867, but Longfellow continued to revise it. [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. [94] Much of his work is recognized for its melodious musicality. Even if time has proved him something less than the master poet he never claimed to be, Longfellow made pioneering contributions to American literary life by exemplifying the possibility of a successful authorial career, by linking American poetry to European traditions beyond England, and by developing a surprisingly wide readership for Romantic poetry. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others. "[139] Author Nicholas A. Basbanes, in his 2020 book Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, defended Longfellow as "the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history". Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. An apocryphal story claims that college trustee Benjamin Orr had been impressed by Longfellow's translation of Horace and hired him under the condition that he travel to Europe to study French, Spanish, and Italian. [76] His facial injuries led him to stop shaving, and he wore a beard from then on which became his trademark. 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