|
Portrait of Longfellow from an 1891 edition of The Song of Hiawatha
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most beloved authors in American history. He has long been something of a people's poet that anyone can digest. He had an easy metre that rolled smoothly and great powers of description. Some of the most famous cliches in the English Language such as "Forest Primeval", "Shot Heard Round the World", etc, came from him. He celebrated a spectrum of people and places, but was notable in being one of the first to bring the New World into being as a subject for epic narrative.
He was also known for being just plain nice. This is one of the things most notable about him. Liking or not liking his writing is taste (though his writing has stood the test of generational consensus) but it is hard to imagine anyone disliking him. He was known to be friendly with all sorts of people and not just those in his Ivy-league circles.
He was born to Stephen and Zilpa Longfellow, the son of a congressman and lawyer of respectable New England lineage. He attended a Dame School (an elementary school taught by a Schoolmarm) as a child and entered Bowdain college at fifteen. Bowdain was known for such distinguished students and alumni as Nathaniel Hawthorn, Hariet Beecher Stowe, and Joshua Chamberlain. He was accepted into Harvard on condition that he take a Grand Tour of Europe. This was a normal Rite of Passage of rich young men at the time and the more literary inclined of them often left fascinating travelogues. Before he did this he married a friend from childhood, Mary Storer. This was to prove a blighted marriage, not so much because it wasn't happy (Longfellow just had a knack for being happy), but because it was cut off when she died in childbirth after four years.
He latter married Fanny Appleton and had six children by her. He had the misfortune to outlive her too when she died in a fire. In the meantime, his academic career prospered and he became a Harvard Professor. He also began his writing career and published several books, mostly poetry collections, which are still widely read today.
- Voices of the Night
- Juvenile and Earlier Poems
- Ballads and Other Poems
- Poems on Slavery
- The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems
- Birds of Passage
- Songs and Sonnets
- The Spanish Student
- Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
- The Seaside and the Fireside
- The Song of Hiawatha
- The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems
- Tales of a Wayside Inn
- Flower-de-Luce
- Dante's Divine Comedy
- The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems
- Keramos and Other Poems
- Ultima Thule
- In the Harbor
- Judas Maccabeus
- Michalangelo: A Fragment
- Fragment
- Translations
- Hyperion: A Romance
- Kavanaugh
- Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea
- Friend to All Children: He always loved children and took time to answer letters from them.
- Genius Book Club: Well isn't that obvious? He's Longfellow. He wrote lots of books and collected them as well. He also had a number of still-famed academics as friends.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: He often dealt with foreign subjects as well as American and had a wide diversity. Italy was a favorite setting of his.
- Girl Next Door: Mary, at least in the more-or-less literal sense as he apparently always knew her. Probably in the tropish sense too, at least she does not seem to be recorded as doing anything outside the standards of respectability.
- Good Parents
- Happily Married: Twice.
- Nerds Are Sexy: Not ostentatiously so, but he did manage to have two women fall in love with him and had six children by the second.
- Second Love: Fanny
- Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The inspiration for Poems on Slavery. He was definitely a stout abolitionist.
- Teen Genius: He was already writing poems that were widely regarded when he was in his teens, and while his gifts were a bit undeveloped they showed themselves.
- Tear Jerker: While his life sometimes seems idyllic, he was not unaffected by tragedy. His favorite sister died of TB. One wife died in child birth and the other in an accident. His uncle died in the War of 1812 and his oldest son was wounded in the American Civil War.
- The poem Christmas Bells was put to music and later sung by several including the The Man in Black himself. It is one of his better known poems of Eucatastrophe.