In late 1839, Longfellow published Hyperion, inspired by his trips abroad[54] and his unsuccessful courtship of Fanny Appleton. In an age that judged literature largely in moral terms as expressive of an authors personal virtues, Longfellow became a kindly, sympathizing, gently encouraging friend to an everyman reader. [134], Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. Kramos and Other Poems appeared in 1878 with a title poem that linked Longfellows boyhood interest in Portland pottery with his later travels and readings to present a particularly effective statement of his poetics. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart. [136] Many of his works helped shape the American character and its legacy, particularly with the poem "Paul Revere's Ride". Born on February 27 46. As a Master NLP and Hypnosis Practitioner, Spiritual Life Coach, and Speech and Drama Teacher, Sally takes a holistic approach to voice - as an energetic channel affected by our physical . [66] His literary income was increasing considerably; in 1840, he had made $219 from his work, but 1850 brought him $1,900. [36] Longfellow published several nonfiction and fiction prose pieces in 1833 inspired by Irving, including "The Indian Summer" and "The Bald Eagle". In 1872 Three Books of Song presented the second part of Tales of a Wayside Inn along with Judas Maccabeus and a group of translations. Aside from a leg injury that nearly resulted in amputation when he was eight, Henry apparently enjoyed his school friendships and outdoor recreation both in Portland and at his Grandfather Wadsworths new home in Hiram, Maine. 1909-14. one of the few truly successful English translations comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of Italian at Harvard and an acclaimed poet. His works are still regularly anthologised after nearly a century and a half. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-1882] was probably the most influential American poet of the 19th Century. About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies. The recent graduate was asked to become the first professor, with the understanding that he should be given a period of time in which to travel and study in Europe. [110] In preparing the volume, Longfellow hired Katherine Sherwood Bonner as an amanuensis. He was still writing learned essays for the North American Reviewthis time concentrating attention on Teutonic languages, including Swedish and early English. According to Howells, Longfellows power derived from his courage in frankly trusting the personal as the universal along with his unaffectedness, the simplicity of his feelings, and the sincerity of his expression. 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. (L.M.) Birth Year: 1807. In the fall of 1822, 15-year-old Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, along with his brother Stephen. 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. There is little action in the story as Longfellow tells it: the Acadians submit quietly to British tyranny; Gabriels adventures take place out of sight; and Evangelines quest involves a good deal of travel, admittedly, but no conflict. How many languages did he speak? Hoffmann, and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)that awakened a new sense of poetry as emotional expression. A revised edition of Hyperion followed in 1869. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. Longfellows achievements in fictional and nonfictional prose, in a striking variety of poetic forms and modes, and in translation from many European languages resulted in a remarkably productive and influential literary career. Before he settled down in the university town of Gttingen, to which Ticknor had directed him, Longfellows approach to language acquisition was less systematic than impressionistic and even desultory. Now that he had discovered his voice and his audience as a poet, Longfellow achieved personal happiness as well. 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. Longfellow gave poetry higher standing within American society than it had enjoyed ever before, not only by exemplifying the appeal of graceful, informed writing to an exceptionally wide reading audience but also by making art itself one of his themes. It represented the medieval phase of Christianity and the virtue of faith (mixed, inevitably, with superstition) by dramatizing the story of a peasant girls willingness to die so that a prince might be healed of his illness. 1864. Henry is an American . Please select which sections you would like to print: Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. if ever fondest prayer' 7. But when Henry was a senior at Bowdoin College at 19, the college established a chair of modern languages. Written in anapestic tetrameter meant to suggest the galloping of a horse, this folk ballad recalls a hero of the American Revolution and his famous midnight ride to warn the Americans about the impending British raid on Concord, Massachusetts. Classic and contemporary poems for the holiday season. Maybe Longfellow exaggerated the heroic story of Paul Revere. The independent-minded Fanny was not interested in marriage, but Longfellow was determined. At college he was attracted especially to Sir Walter Scotts romances and Washington Irvings Sketch Book, and his verses appeared in national magazines. Financial rewards confirmed Longfellows youthful hope that an American could make a living through literature, although, as William Charvat says, Longfellows income derived as much from his prose as from his poetry. English Literature - Jamie Handitye "Fair is foul and foul is fair" In the quote above, we are introduced to the witches in the very first scene of Macbeth. [11] He studied at the Portland Academy until age 14. His 1868-1869 final visit to Europe, on which he was attended by a large family party, turned into a triumphal progression framed by honorary degrees awarded by Cambridge and Oxford universities. Again, Longfellow coped with sorrow by plunging himself into literary workthis time of an intensely challenging sort. 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. Always a writer at heart, when Henry wasn't in school he and his childhood friend, William Browne, planned . - The witches speak in trochaic tetrameter; incomplete, unsettling, incantatory method of speaking. [50] Poet John Greenleaf Whittier said that Longfellow's poetry illustrated "the careful moulding by which art attains the graceful ease and chaste simplicity of nature". He was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws from Harvard in 1859. tags: poetry. She was in and out of consciousness throughout the night and was administered ether. . We speak of a continuum because there are inter- mediate economies, combining horticultural and agricultural featuresmore intensive than annually shifting horticulture but less intensive than agricul- ture. He wrote in his journal in 1878: "I have only one desire; and that is for harmony, and a frank and honest understanding between North and South". 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. The failure of its first publisher kept half the first edition of 1,200 copies from distribution, and the eventual readership of the book, American travelers in Europe, probably discovered Hyperion based on its authors later reputation rather than its inherent merits as prose fiction. [126] At Longfellow's funeral, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "a sweet and beautiful soul". She married Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet, buried at this cem.) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807, the second child of eight born to Zilpah ne Wadsworth (1778-1851) and lawyer Stephen Longfellow (1775-1849) in the city of Portland, Maine. "Resignation" was written as a response to the death of his daughter Fanny in 1848; it does not use first-person pronouns and is instead a generalized poem of mourning. Snow-Flakes. He followed this work with two fragmentary dramatic poems, Judas Maccabaeus and Michael Angelo. But his genius was not dramatic, as he had demonstrated earlier in The Spanish Student (1843). When an eye injury that may have resulted from his intensive editing and translating efforts for the massive The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845) interfered with his writing, she helped by reading aloud for him, copying out his poem drafts, and handling much of his correspondence. Even as our cloudy fancies take Suddenly shape in some divine expression, Even as the troubled heart doth . This collection consisted of narrative poems composed in a great variety of metric patterns. [127] Poet Walt Whitman considered him an imitator of European forms, but he praised his ability to reach a popular audience as "the expressor of common themesof the little songs of the masses". [86] The next year, he declined an offer to be nominated for the Board of Overseers at Harvard "for reasons very conclusive to my own mind". BOSTON: TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 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. Although the sonnet Mezzo Cammin, written toward the end of that stay in Germany, laments how Half of my life is gone, and I have let / The years slip from me and have not fulfilled / The aspiration of my youth, to build / Some tower of song, he was entering into a vigorously productive period of his career. "[113], Longfellow's early collections Voices of the Night and Ballads and Other Poems made him instantly popular. 'Farewell! 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. [40] She did not recover and died after several weeks of illness at the age of 22 on November 29, 1835. The most humorous and charming of his longer narrative poems, The Courtship of Miles Standish relates a story already familiar (especially in Longfellows family) about John Aldens fortunate failure in his dutiful attempt to woo the maiden he loves on behalf of the widowed captain of Plymouth, his friend Miles Standish. He's a visual artist and a political activist for the American Indian Movement. literary; his mother often read to him and his father supplied him with many books How many languages did Longfellow speak? [141] As James Russell Lowell said, Longfellow had an "absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty". Updates? Although the original story involved the maidens lifelong search only through New England, Longfellow extended its geographic range. In 1845, he published The Poets and Poetry of Europe, an 800-page compilation of translations made by other writers, including many by his friend and colleague Cornelius Conway Felton. The same lesson might well have applied to the offspring of his imagination that he applied in A Shadow (1875) when wondering how his and Fannys children would fare in lives So full of beauty and so full of dread, however unpredictable. [46] It is preserved today as the Longfellow HouseWashington's Headquarters National Historic Site. Fanny is also credited with directly inspiring two poems that emerged from their wedding trip The Arsenal at Springfield, the peace poem she requested, and The Old Clock on the Stairs; both poems appeared in The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845; copyright 1846). In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcrafts two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). He spent much of his summers as a child at his grandfather Peleg's farm in Hiram, Maine. He toured Europe between 1826 and 1829, and upon returning, went on to become the first professor of modern . [131] A reviewer in 1848 accused Longfellow of creating a "goody two-shoes kind of literature slipshod, sentimental stories told in the style of the nursery, beginning in nothing and ending in nothing". The Harvard Classics. In 1842 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, swept the nation. [68] In 1854, he retired from Harvard,[69] devoting himself entirely to writing. While coping with private tragedy at home, he suffered the additional trauma of the Civil War. The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Paul Revere's Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, Christus: A Mystery, The Masque Of Pandora and More. Longfellow began publishing his poetry in 1839, including the collection Voices of the Night, his debut book of poetry. SOLO: Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-neb. Although sales of individual later volumes never matched the popularity of his mid-career offerings, Longfellow lived to experience recognition and rewards seldom enjoyed by other writers. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 . [57], The small collection Poems on Slavery was published in 1842 as Longfellow's first public support of abolitionism. Despite relatively tepid public response to this effort, Longfellow persevered with The Divine Tragedy (1871), in which he represented Christian hope through dramatization of Christs Passion and its effects on many characters drawn from the Bible. [39] In October 1835, his wife Mary had a miscarriage during the trip, about six months into her pregnancy. Long after his death in 1882, however, these neglected later works were seen to contain some of his most effective writing. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. John and Priscilla Alden's love story was popularized by The Courtship of Miles Standish, a narrative poem published by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John and Priscilla Alden's descendant, in 1858. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others. -4 TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN. [93] Typically, he would carefully consider the subject of his poetic ideas for a long time before deciding on the right metrical form for it. A driving northwesterly storm succeeded, and before the sun was set every vestige of spring had vanished; the lake, the mountains, the village, and the fields being again hidden under one dazzling coat of snow. Both seaside and fireside come together in The Fire of Drift-Wood, a mood piece employing imagery of light and warmth drawn from shipwreck as a metaphor for intuited estrangement among friends. . [72] Her dress suddenly caught fire, but it is unclear exactly how;[73] burning wax or a lighted candle may have fallen onto it. 'When We Two Parted' 8. [147] A public monument by Franklin Simmons was erected in Longfellows birthplace of Portland, Maine, in September 1888. Flashcards. 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 . Most of us only get one life. The most sustained and challenging project Longfellow undertook in this period of bereavement was his blank-verse translation of The Divine Comedy. 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. [75] Longfellow had burned himself while trying to save her, badly enough that he was unable to attend her funeral. Most of his publications for the next few years involved textbooks for students of Spanish, French, and Italian. He dug through the past for stories that could could speak to his time, or that could act as cultural containers of collective memory. The dominance of free verse fostered contempt for Longfellows songlike versification and an indifference to its experimental qualities. [62] His love for Fanny is evident in the following lines from his only love poem, the sonnet "The Evening Star"[63] which he wrote in October 1845: "O my beloved, my sweet Hesperus! [98] His memorial poem to her was the sonnet "The Cross of Snow" and was not published in his lifetime. The poem exalts and exocitizes Native Americans and assumes the obliteration of indigenous ways of life. [67], On June 14, 1853, Longfellow held a farewell dinner party at his Cambridge home for his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was preparing to move overseas. That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882) was America's most beloved nineteenth-century poet, . 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