Interesting facts about henry wadsworth longfellow
He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. He has been criticized for imitating European styles and writing poetry that was too sentimental. His father was a lawyer, and his maternal grandfather was Peleg Wadsworth , a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Member of Congress.
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Longfellow was descended from English colonists who settled in New England in the early s. Longfellow attended a dame school at the age of three and was enrolled by age six at the private Portland Academy. In his years there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin. He spent much of his summers as a child at his grandfather Peleg's farm in Hiram, Maine.
In the fall of , year-old Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine , along with his brother Stephen. I will not disguise it in the least I am almost confident in believing, that if I can ever rise in the world it must be by the exercise of my talents in the wide field of literature. He pursued his literary goals by submitting poetry and prose to various newspapers and magazines, partly due to encouragement from Professor Thomas Cogswell Upham.
After graduating in , Longfellow was offered a job as professor of modern languages at his alma mater. 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.
Whatever the catalyst, Longfellow began his tour of Europe in May aboard the ship Cadmus. He published the travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea in serial form before a book edition was released in He considered moving to New York after New York University proposed offering him a newly created professorship of modern languages, but there would be no salary.
The professorship was not created and Longfellow agreed to continue teaching at Bowdoin. He wrote, "I hate the sight of pen, ink, and paper I do not believe that I was born for such a lot. I have aimed higher than this". Longfellow had her body embalmed immediately and placed in a lead coffin inside an oak coffin, which was shipped to Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston.
She is dead — She is dead! All day I am weary and sad". Several years later, he wrote the poem "Mezzo Cammin", which expressed his personal struggles in his middle years. Longfellow returned to the United States in and took up the professorship at Harvard. 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 Longfellow began publishing his poetry in , including the collection Voices of the Night , his debut book of poetry.
There he began courting Appleton's daughter Frances "Fanny" Appleton. The independent-minded Fanny was not interested in marriage, but Longfellow was determined. The lady says she will not! I say she shall! It is not pride , but the madness of passion". That bridge was replaced in by a new bridge which was later renamed the Longfellow Bridge.
In late , Longfellow published Hyperion , inspired by his trips abroad [ 55 ] and his unsuccessful courtship of Fanny Appleton.
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The small collection Poems on Slavery was published in as Longfellow's first public support of abolitionism. However, as Longfellow himself wrote, the poems were "so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast". Longfellow's thin books; spirited and polished like its forerunners; but the topic would warrant a deeper tone".
On May 10, , Longfellow received a letter from Fanny Appleton agreeing to marry him. He was too restless to take a carriage and walked 90 minutes to meet her at her house. My morning and my evening star of love!
Longfellow biography american poet society
Nathan Cooley Keep administered ether to the mother as the first obstetric anesthetic in the United States. On June 14, , Longfellow held a farewell dinner party at his Cambridge home for his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne , who was preparing to move overseas. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws from Harvard in Frances was putting locks of her children's hair into an envelope on July 9, [ 72 ] and attempting to seal it with hot sealing wax while Longfellow took a nap.
He stifled the flames with his body, but she was badly burned. She was in and out of consciousness throughout the night and was administered ether. She died shortly after 10 the next morning, July 10, after requesting a cup of coffee. Longfellow was devastated by Frances's death and never fully recovered; he occasionally resorted to laudanum and ether to deal with his grief.
Longfellow spent several years translating Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy.
To aid him in perfecting the translation and reviewing proofs, he invited friends to meetings every Wednesday starting in At that time, this was the highest price ever paid for a poem. Longfellow supported abolitionism and especially hoped for reconciliation between the northern and southern states after the American Civil War.
His son Charles was injured during the war, [ 86 ] and he wrote the poem "Christmas Bells", later the basis of the carol I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. He wrote in his journal in "I have only one desire; and that is for harmony, and a frank and honest understanding between North and South". He read the poem "Morituri Salutamus" so quietly that few could hear him.
On August 22, , 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 visitor then asked if he had died here. Completed in , this work was concerned with "various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages. Several more volumes of Longfellow's verse were issued before his death on March 24, , in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After his death, he became the first American whose bust sculpture of one's head was placed in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey , London, England. To the modern reader, Longfellow's sentimental and optimistic poetry often sounds old-fashioned. He used his wide knowledge of the literature of other countries as a source for both the form and content of many of his poems.
Several of his poems are set in other countries including Italy, Spain , France , and Norway. It should be remembered that Longfellow wrote for the common man. In his elegant and clear style he presented popular American values, such as the family circle and heroism. Carpenter, George Rice. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: Small, Maynard, Reprint, Philadelphia: R.
West, Lukes, Bonnie L. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Raynolds, Thompson, Lawrance. Young Longfellow, — New York : Macmillan, Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.
Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. The insistent moral tone, sentimentality, and serene idealism of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made him an extremely popular author at home and abroad in the 19th century.
He attended Portland Academy and then Bowdoin College, graduating in He was an excellent student whose skill in languages led the trustees at Bowdoin of which his father was one to offer the young graduate a professorship of modern languages.
American poets society anthology: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most popular American poet in the 19th century. His notable works included The Song of Hiawatha and ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’ Longfellow’s poems typically featured sweetness, simplicity, and a romantic vision shaded by melancholy. Learn more about his life and career.
He prepared himself further with study abroad at his own expense before undertaking his duties. During Longfellow's 3 years in Europe his lifelong rapport with Old World civilization was firmly established. He returned home in and 2 years later married Mary Storer Potter. In Longfellow accepted a professorship at Harvard but did not take up his duties until , after he had completed a tour of European and Scandinavian countries.
While staying at Heidelberg, he came under the spell of the works of the German romantic poet Novalis, whose moody, mystical nocturnalism struck a responsive chord in the grieving Longfellow. On his return to Cambridge he settled in Craigie House. In Hyperion he rather indiscreetly told the story of his pursuit of Frances Appleton, whom he had met in Europe soon after his wife's death.
In , after a 7-year courtship, they were married. As an avatar of the emerging Boston culture industry, Longfellow was not just a moral emblem but a profitable venture: his books sold extraordinarily well. He wrote prolifically, and his publishers — first Ticknor and Fields, later Houghton Mifflin — were constantly bringing out new volumes and new editions of his collected poems, at all different price points for different segments of the expanding book trade.
Longfellow was frequently profiled in newspapers and magazines, and the release of poems like The Song of Hiawatha in and The Courtship of Miles Standish in were "events" shrewdly orchestrated to maximize sales. Even in his own lifetime, therefore, Longfellow was larger than life, an institution associated with an array of ideological, social, and commercial interests.
Longfellow was often happiest when paying least attention to such matters, but his public aura forms a scrim against which his private self must be seen. Longfellow's domestic happiness was shattered in , when his wife Fanny died of burns after fire engulfed her from a candle accidentally knocked over as she was melting wax to seal locks of her children's hair.
A widower once again, never to remarry, Longfellow continued to raise the children — the oldest was fourteen, the youngest five at the time of the tragedy — and, perhaps to drown his grief, continued to write: lyric poems, the narrative poems collected in Tales of a Wayside Inn, verse dramas, and his landmark three-volume translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
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His impressive output never slowing down, in the last decade of his life Longfellow published five new collections of poems, as well as assorted other writings. By the time he died, aged 75, in March , at his home in Cambridge, he had become a national elder, a white-bearded eminence whose Jove-like image was widely circulated in lithographs and photographs.
Sarah Orne Jewett captured something of the importance of Longfellow in the national imagination when she wrote in eulogy, "It is a grander thing than we can wholly grasp, that life of his, a wonderful life. This world could hardly ask any more from him: he has done so much for it, and the news of his death takes away from most people nothing of his life.
His work stands like a great cathedral in which the world may worship and be taught to pray, long after its tired architect goes home to rest.
Jewett could refer so knowingly to "[t]hat life of his, a wonderful life" because its basic outlines were a point of public fascination, an indispensable part of the Longfellow legend. The patrician ancestry, the European travels, the early loss of his first wife, the Harvard professorship, the long courtship of Fanny Appleton, the five children, the historic old house in which they peaceably lived, the steadily mounting fame — these items hardly bore repeating in the popular press, so great was Longfellow's celebrity, and yet were repeated nonetheless.
Craigie House named for a former owner, Andrew Craigie, apothecary general under George Washington during the American Revolution became a focal point of Longfellow's fame, which rested to some large extent on his life and even his lifestyle. This was a period when private life and the private home took on new public importance, and Longfellow's prestige and authority as a kind of national father figure could seem all the greater by dint of his owning such a place.
The house itself, an imposing late-Georgian mansion painted a proper yellow with white trim and black shutters, bespoke affluence, dignity, and tradition. Early in the Revolutionary War it had served as Washington's military headquarters, and hence came down to Longfellow as a patriotic treasure; images of it were frequently reproduced in editions of Longfellow's works, as well as in pictorial magazines, postcards, advertisements, and such other popular media of the times as stereopticon cards.
No other author's home, with the possible exception of Washington Irving's Sunnyside, could rival Craigie House in fame. With the emergence of the Colonial Revival movement in American architecture, many replica Craigie Houses appeared around the country— the first built in in Maine, the second in outside Chicago. Craigie House appeared in Longfellow's poetry too, where it comes across as a place of familial contentment.
In poems like "To a Child" and "Children," Longfellow seemed to invite readers into his home, opening the door just a crack! Such glimpses gave readers the illusion that they knew the illustrious Professor Longfellow in his intimate domestic moments. The father's affection is palpable. Longfellow earned the love and respect, the tenderness and reverence of his readers, then, not just as a poet but as a model husband and father, a father figure, with a privileged home life that could be glimpsed, at times, in his writing.
The success of this self-representation may be judged from an letter written by the novelist Henry James to his mother; James, in London, wrote of a British lord who one day over lunch came out with the thought that "his ideal of the happy life was that of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 'living like Longfellow. Longfellow's reputation grew so large that the reputation itself became a legend, subject to all the falsehoods of the legendary.
Contrary to the popular wisdom that Longfellow was almost unanimously adored in the nineteenth-century, with a few grumpy exceptions like Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller, the truth is that he was always controversial, always contested. Reviewers and editors in the newspapers and magazines took sides, often not merely on literary but on ideological grounds.
The questions that concerned the critics—was Longfellow original or derivative, was he "American" enough or too European, was he "in touch" or was he too cloistered, were his metrical choices fitting? At the beginning of his career, for instance, Longfellow signified to many readers a welcome relaxation of the famously severe New England outlook, while for others he introduced an unwelcome note of European cosmopolitanism.
By his career's end, in Victorian America, he seemed to many a stable, authoritative bulwark against accelerating change, while for others he was a staid emblem of an outmoded era. While the critics were battling it out, the public took Longfellow into their hearts. He also wrote novels and essays. In the early s, his poems were translated into Russian, although earlier attempts at translating his works into prose had been made.
His most famous work, "The Song of Hiawatha," was translated by D. Mikhaylovsky in partially and more fully , but it did not attract significant attention from Russian literary critics at that time. It was only when I.