Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland on February 24, 1807, the
second son in a family of eight children. His mother, Zilpah Wadsworth, was the
daughter of a Revolutionary War hero. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was a
prominent Portland lawyer and later a member of Congress.
Henry was a dreamy boy who loved to read. He heard
sailors speaking Spanish, French and German in the Portland streets and liked
stories set in foreign places: The Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe,
and the plays of Shakespeare.
After graduating from Bowdoin College, Longfellow
studied modern languages in Europe for three years, then returned to Bowdoin to
teach them. In 1831 he married Mary Potter of Portland, a former classmate, and
soon published his first book, a description of his travels called Outre
Mer (“Overseas”). But in November 1835, during a second trip to
Europe, Longfellow’s life was shaken when his wife died during a miscarriage.
The young teacher spent a grief-stricken year in Germany and Switzerland.
Longfellow took a position at Harvard in 1836. Three
years later, at the age of thirty-two, he published his first collection of
poems, Voices of the Night, followed in 1841 by Ballads and
Other Poems. Many of these poems (“A Psalm of Life," for example)
showed people triumphing over adversity, and in a struggling young nation that
theme was inspiring. Both books were very popular, but Longfellow’s growing
duties as a professor left him little time to write more. In addition, Frances
Appleton, a young woman from Boston, had refused his proposal of marriage.
Frances finally accepted his proposal the following
spring, ushering in the happiest eighteen years of Longfellow’s life. The
couple had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood, and the marriage gave
him new confidence. In 1847, he published Evangeline, a
book-length poem about what would now be called “ethnic cleansing.” The poem
takes place as the British drive the French from Nova Scotia, and two lovers
are parted, only to find each other years later when the man is about to die.
In 1854, Longfellow decided to quit teaching to devote
all his time to poetry. He published Hiawatha, a long poem
about Native American life, and The Courtship of Miles Standish and
Other Poems. Both books were immensely successful, but Longfellow was now
preoccupied with national events. With the country moving toward civil war, he
wrote "Paul Revere’s Ride," a call for courage in the coming conflict.
A few months after the war began in 1861, Frances
Longfellow was sealing an envelope with wax when her dress caught fire. Despite
her husband’s desperate attempts to save her, she died the next day. Profoundly
saddened, Longfellow published nothing for the next two years. He found comfort
in his family and in reading Dante’s Divine
Comedy. (Later, he produced its first American translation.) Tales
of a Wayside Inn, largely written before his wife’s death, was published in
1863.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, the poet was
fifty-eight. His most important work was finished, but his fame kept growing.
In London alone, twenty-four different companies were publishing his work. His
poems were popular throughout the English-speaking world, and they were widely
translated, making him the most famous American of his day. His admirers
included Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, and Charles Baudelaire.
From 1866 to 1880, Longfellow published seven more
books of poetry, and his seventy-fifth birthday in 1882 was celebrated across
the country. But his health was failing, and he died the following month, on
March 24. When Walt Whitman heard of the poet’s death, he wrote that, while Longfellow’s work
“brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows," he was the
sort of bard most needed in a materialistic age: “He comes as the poet of
melancholy, courtesy, deference—poet of all sympathetic gentleness—and
universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were
asked to name the man who has done more and in more valuable directions, for
America.”
