Longfellow and Mary Potter were married in September 1831. 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 . " I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day " is a Christmas carol based on the 1863 poem "Christmas Bells" by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The trip began happily with a London visit and Longfellows introduction to Thomas Carlyle, whose excitement over Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller heightened Longfellows interest in German Romanticism. "[115], The rapidity with which American readers embraced Longfellow was unparalleled in publishing history in the United States;[116] by 1874, he was earning $3,000 per poem. 4.33 avg rating 57 ratings. That bridge was replaced in 1906 by a new bridge which was later renamed the Longfellow Bridge. [95] As he says, "what a writer asks of his reader is not so much to like as to listen". [135] As a friend once wrote, "no other poet was so fully recognized in his lifetime". Their children were: Alice Mary born in about 1850, Ernest Wadsworth born in about 1845, Charles Appleton born in about 1844, Fanny born in about 1847 and died in 1848, Edith born in 1853, and Anne Allegra born in 1855. Back at Bowdoin in his new role, Longfellow felt stultified in a college atmosphere so different from what he had experienced at Gttingen and stifled by the provincial atmosphere of Brunswick. Hyatt Waggoner observed the irony of Longfellows having been most appreciated in his own time for A Psalm of Life, noting that though it intends to mean that life is worth living after all, what it effectively does mean is that life must be worth living but the poet cant think why. That ordeal touched his family directly in late 1862, when Charles Longfellow was wounded while fighting for the Union army; his father and brother made an anxious trip to Washington to escort him home. 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. Most of us only get one life. Just like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did I believe that EVERY interaction with customers, employees, stakeholders or stockholders, matters. 1807-1882 Ranked #33 in the top 500 poets. Death Year: 1882. 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. was born at Portland, Maine, Feb. 27, 1807, and graduated at Bowdoin College, 1825. Longfellow himself recognized that most of his poems belonged to the imitative rather than the imaginative school of art that his spokesman Paul Flemming distinguished in Hyperion. [87], On August 22, 1879, a female admirer traveled to Longfellow's house in Cambridge and, unaware to whom she was speaking, asked him: "Is this the house where Longfellow was born?" The Building of the Ship combines a tribute to the master builder who designed the ship with a love story linking the masters daughter to the fiery youth employed in its construction while making clear that the Union stood allegorically for the United States on the eve of secession. [31] Shortly after the book's publication, Longfellow attempted to join the literary circle in New York and asked George Pope Morris for an editorial role at one of Morris's publications. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. 4.3.1: The Pioneers (1823) is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts. 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. [44] The home was built in 1759 and was the headquarters of George Washington during the Siege of Boston beginning in July 1775. Favorable responses to poems, reviews, sketches, and essays he contributed to the Portland Advertiser, American Monthly Magazine, and United States Literary Gazette sparked hopes for editing and writing opportunities that collided against the materialistic pragmatism of New England culture. Answer and Explanation: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had six children. Longfellow's popularity rapidly declined, beginning shortly after his death and into the 20th century, as academics focused attention on other poets such as Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost. The Warning, written last but drawn in part from his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, concluded this slim volume with the image of a poor, blind Samson in this land capable someday of shaking the pillars of this Commonweal, / Till the vast Temple of our liberties / A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies. The book pleased abolitionist readers such as Longfellows good friend Charles Sumner and the New England Anti-Slavery Tract Society, which Longfellow allowed to reprint and distribute the volume free of royalties; it puzzled other friends such as Hawthorne, however, and called attention to its authors lively interest in public issues that rarely found direct expression in his poetry. He moved ahead to new dramatic poems, notably Judas Maccabeus in Three Books of Song (1872) and The Masque of Pandora (1875); Michael Angelo, his last major poem, appeared posthumously in 1883 in its unfinished condition. if ever fondest prayer' 7. His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). He was still writing learned essays for the North American Reviewthis time concentrating attention on Teutonic languages, including Swedish and early English. For the actor, see, "Longfellow" redirects here. In 1854 he resigned his Harvard professorshippartly because of his eyesight, partly for relief from academic pressures and contention with the university corporation on behalf of his department, but probably most of all because he found he could support his household on the strength of his poetry and desired more opportunity for writing. During his lifetime Longfellow was loved and admired both at home and abroad. She helps professionals and business owners speak with confidence - from stepping on stage to speaking on podcasts to showing up online and in the boardroom. When Longfellow graduated, the college gave him a chair in modern languages, and he worked with translations for the rest of his life. 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. Returning to Maine in summer 1829, Longfellow as a young professor soon found himself immersed in the unpoetic routines of pedagogy. The most warmly received of such poems composed in the 1850s, however, was The Childrens Hour, which reflected the poets delight in his small daughters. [66] Longfellow published his epic poem Evangeline for the first time a few months later on November 1, 1847. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Wadsworth-Longfellow, Academy of American Poets - Biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, National Park Service - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Official Site of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maine: An Encyclopedia - Biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poetry Foundation - Biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet who used narrative poems to memorialize people and events in American history, including Paul Revere. [56] Amidst this, he fell into "periods of neurotic depression with moments of panic" and took a six-month leave of absence from Harvard to attend a health spa in the former Marienberg Benedictine Convent at Boppard in Germany. In that university town he met William Cullen Bryant, who had been a major influence on his early poetry and an inspiring model of American authorship. Aspiring to scholarly recognition beyond Brunswick, Longfellow also regularly wrote essays on French, Spanish, and Italian languages and literatures for the North American Review between 1831 and 1833. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). His second wife, Frances Appleton, died in 1861 after sustaining burns when her dress caught fire. Despite some criticism of the Virgilian dactylic hexameter meter with which Longfellow experimented in Evangeline, the poem proved enormously successful. Most poems in the book had appeared earlier in Grahams Magazine, which had paid both Longfellow and Bryant the unprecedented sum of 50 dollars a poem, and had reappeared in an illustrated edition of Longfellows poems published earlier that year by Carey and Hart in Philadelphia. Born on February 27, 1807, in Portland (while Maine was still a part of Massachusetts), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grew up in the thriving coastal city he remembered in My Lost Youth (1856) for its wharves and woodlands, the ships and sailors from distant lands who sparked his boyish imagination, and the historical associations of its old fort and an 1813 offshore naval battle between American and British brigs. Some of Longfellows sonnets and other lyrics are still among the finest in American poetry, and Hiawatha, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Evangeline, and Paul Reveres Ride have become inseparable parts of the American heritage. The New-Yorker called him "one of the very few in our time who has successfully aimed in putting poetry to its best and sweetest uses". 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 . Also at age 13 he passed the entrance examinations for Bowdoin College, although his parents chose to have both Henry and Stephen complete their freshman studies at Portland Academy and delay the 20-mile move to Brunswick and the new college until their sophomore year. I do not believe that I was born for such a lot. Each new book extended his fame, and he was bombarded with invitations for literary contributions and for autographs. Flashcards. 4 In 1773, Parliament passed a law giving the English East India Company exclusive right to sell tea in America. A revised edition of Hyperion followed in 1869. He entered Bowdoin College at the age of 15, and one of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne; the two would remain lifelong friends. [134], Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. Sweetness, gentleness, simplicity, and a romantic vision shaded by melancholy are the characteristic features of Longfellows poetry. Longfellows imitativeness differed significantly from that of many contemporaries, however, in that he early outgrew his tendency to echo Bryants style or that of English Romantic poets and turned instead to German Romanticism, which he virtually introduced into American poetry, and to traditions of European verse from many countries and eras. He produced one of the first complete, and in many respects still the best, English translations of The Divine Comedy in 1867. . [1] The song tells of the narrator hearing Christmas bells during the American Civil War, but despairing that "hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men". According to Charvat, by shrewd, aggressive, and intelligent management of the business of writing, he raised the commercial value of verse and thereby helped other American poets to get out of the garret. [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". She serves as a model of affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient. The crucial event of the story is the reunion that almost happens but fails, when Gabriels northward-bound boat passes at night by the one in which Evangeline and their priest are resting on their journey to his fathers new home. Based on Chippewa (Ojibway) culture and traditions as represented by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and John Tanner, on John G. E. Heckewelders defense of Delaware culture, and on Longfellows acquaintance with an Ojibway chief who stayed at his house, the poem also drew on widespread literary and visual representations of the West to construct what Longfellow called his Indian Edda. Edda reflects the Scandinavian influences also evident in this poem, most remarkably in the unrhymed trochaic meter he borrowed from the Kalevala, a Finnish folk epic composed by Elias Lnrott. Born on February 27, 1807 in Portland, Maine, USA , United States. His model was Washington Irving, to whom he was introduced while in Spain, and Longfellow envisaged putting his experience to Irvingesque literary use. 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. 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. Longfellow laid the groundwork for other authorial careers by persuading readers of the importance of art as well as by demonstrating how literature could be turned into a paying proposition in a country known for material ambition. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart. jOKO* 1 iHliSUMtfililafill ,lill ^*'^ vO ,, ^ '" ^" A^ 0>' ^^ ''>.'^ ^'^ U. ,v .^^..o ^- .^^' - Although Longfellow introduced a love story in his account of Hiawathas wooing of Minnehaha, their marriage, and her death, for the most part he assembled legends he found in Schoolcrafts many books to exalt his Ojibway hero as a leader of supernatural birth (son of the West Wind, Mudjekeewis, and of Wenonah, whose mother, Nokomis, had fallen from the heavens) who leads his people in ways of peace. Richard Henry Stoddard summed up Longfellows contribution in an 1881 essay, pointing out how Longfellow remained true to himself and to his scholarly impulses by creating and satisfying a taste for a literature which did not exist in this country until he began to write. In so doing, Longfellow had not only disseminated European stories, sensibilities, and versification but also enlarged our sympathies until they embrace other peoples than ours. Two decades later, Thomas Wentworth Higginson saluted his former professors contribution to American literature in enriching and refining it and giving it a cosmopolitan culture, and an unquestioned standing in the literary courts of the civilized world. Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown's execution for attempting to arm slaves . About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Analyzes how henry wadsworth longfellow, born in portland, maine on february 27th, 1807, opened the eyes of americans everywhere through his rhythmic poetry. The Divina Commedia group of six sonnets written between 1864 and 1866 honor the Tuscan poet Dantemost memorably the first, with its image of the bereaved American poet leaving my burden at this minster gate, / Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray in a quest for spiritual peace. However, as Longfellow himself wrote, the poems were "so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast". 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. Other than being a poet of great repute; Longfellow was also an educationist, who was a professor at his alma mater Bowdoin College and latter at the Harvard College. [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. I have aimed higher than this". UNIVE'RSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY, CAMBRIDGE. Its appeal to the public was immediate. Similar to an epic, a narrative poem tells a story. Born Henry WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Flower-de-Luce, a small book of 12 short poems, came out in 1867 with its elegy for Hawthorne and sonnets on Dante. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. She named this second son among her eight children for her brother, Henry Wadsworth, who had died in Tripoli harbor in 1804. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. [92] His published poetry shows great versatility, using anapestic and trochaic forms, blank verse, heroic couplets, ballads, and sonnets. Again, Longfellow coped with sorrow by plunging himself into literary workthis time of an intensely challenging sort. At present, however, Longfellow has been relegated to the status of an historically interesting minor poet whose poems occupy only a few pages in recent anthologies and do so in ways that obscure the reasons for his original popularity. The boys first publication, appearing in the November 17, 1820 Portland Gazette and signed simply Henry, drew on local history for a melancholy four-quatrain salute to warriors who fell at The Battle of Lovells Pond. A family friends dismissal of the piece as both stiff and derivative may have discouraged Henrys ambition for the time. 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. [33] It may have been joyless work. He spoke at least eight languages well and could . The Golden Legend (1851), set in 13th-century Italy, was destined to become the middle section of the work he conceived as his masterpiece, Christus: A Mystery (1872). After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on translating works from foreign languages. The book holdings of the Peucinian Society, its formal debates, and its informal Conversations about contemporary writing and American authors encouraged Henry to direct his ambition toward literature despite his practical fathers preference for a career in law or one of the other established professions. This collection was Longfellows version of Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales or Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron. Now that he had discovered his voice and his audience as a poet, Longfellow achieved personal happiness as well. Haiku. Longfellow's benign poetic temperament owes much to his full and fortunate life. 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 reputation could also benefit from renewed critical respect for sentimentalism, especially as that respect gets extended to male authors. In Switzerland, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany he was welcomed and honored. Shortly after his return from Europe, he began his courtship of Mary Potter, daughter of Judge Barrett Potter; she was a Portland neighbor who was a friend of his sister Anne. Resuming friendship with Fanny and Mary Appleton and their brother Tom, Longfellow was crushed by Fannys rejection of his 1837 marriage proposal. [117] His popularity spread throughout Europe, as well, and his poetry was translated during his lifetime into Italian, French, German, and other languages. 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