A short life of the author
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27 February 1807 – 24 March 1882) was an American poet who was, during his lifetime, the most popular and widely read poet in the English-speaking world — more popular than Tennyson in America, more widely translated than any American poet before or since. His narrative poems — Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861) — entered the national consciousness so completely that their phrases and rhythms became part of the American vernacular. He was the first American poet to be memorialised in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Life
Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), into a prominent New England family. He attended Bowdoin College, where his classmate was Nathaniel Hawthorne, and after graduation spent three years studying languages in Europe. He became Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard in 1836, a position he held for eighteen years.
His personal life was marked by devastating loss. His first wife, Mary Storer Potter, died during a miscarriage in Rotterdam in 1835. His second wife, Fanny Appleton, died in 1861 when her dress caught fire while she was sealing envelopes with wax. Longfellow was badly burned trying to save her and grew the famous beard that appears in all his later portraits to conceal the scars.
Despite these tragedies, Longfellow was genial, sociable, and enormously productive. His Cambridge home, Craigie House (now the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site), was a centre of literary and intellectual life.
The Narrative Poems
Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847) — written in dactylic hexameter, an unusual metre for English poetry — tells the story of Evangeline Bellefontaine, an Acadian woman separated from her lover during the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755. The poem established Longfellow as a major poet and made the Acadian expulsion a subject of national consciousness.
The Song of Hiawatha (1855) — based on legends of the Ojibwe people, written in a distinctive trochaic tetrameter adapted from the Finnish epic Kalevala — was an enormous popular success and a critical controversy. The poem’s rhythmic insistence (“By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water”) was parodied almost immediately and has been mocked ever since, but the poem’s attempt to create an American national epic from Indigenous material was culturally significant.
The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) retells a Pilgrim legend. “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861, from Tales of a Wayside Inn) — “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere” — is probably the most memorised American poem. It is historically inaccurate in several respects, but its narrative energy and patriotic fervour made it a fixture of American schoolrooms for over a century.
Lyric Poetry
Longfellow’s shorter poems include “A Psalm of Life” (“Tell me not, in mournful numbers”), “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Cross of Snow” — a private sonnet about his wife’s death that was found in his papers after his death and is considered his finest lyric. He also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (1865–1867), the first American translation, which remains respected for its accuracy.
The Dante Translation
Longfellow’s translation of The Divine Comedy (1865–1867) — the first complete American translation — was a monumental scholarly undertaking. He convened a “Dante Club” at his Cambridge home, with members including James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Eliot Norton, who reviewed and critiqued each canto. The translation, in unrhymed iambic pentameter that follows Dante’s terza rima structure without attempting to replicate it, prioritises accuracy over poetic effect. It remained a standard English Comedy for decades and demonstrated that Longfellow was not merely a popular versifier but a serious literary scholar with a command of medieval Italian that few American contemporaries could match.
Critical Standing
Longfellow’s critical reputation has undergone one of the most dramatic declines in American literary history. During his lifetime, he was the most famous American poet — his seventy-fifth birthday in 1882 was celebrated as a national event, and Queen Victoria received him at Windsor Castle. By the early twentieth century, he was dismissed by modernist critics (particularly the New Critics) as sentimental, derivative, and technically unsophisticated. This reassessment was often unfair — Longfellow’s command of metre and his narrative skill were genuine — but it reflected real limitations: his poetry lacks the philosophical depth of Emerson, the visionary intensity of Whitman, and the psychological complexity of Dickinson.
Recent scholarship has taken a more balanced view, recognising Longfellow’s role in shaping American cultural identity while acknowledging his artistic limitations. His narrative poems — whatever their critical standing — shaped the way Americans understood their own history for over a century, and phrases from his work remain embedded in the language.
Collecting Longfellow
Voices of the Night (1839, John Owen, Cambridge) in first edition brings $200–$800. Evangeline (1847, Ticknor and Fields) brings $100–$500. The Song of Hiawatha (1855) brings $100–$400. The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) brings $50–$200. Longfellow’s books were published in large editions and are widely available; fine copies with original cloth command higher prices.