Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond", and almost nobody noticed. What followed across the next six decades was one of the most remarkable literary careers in American history: a man who became so celebrated that his 70th birthday took on the air of a national holiday, with parades and speeches and the public reading of his poetry. Then, not long after his death, the academics turned on him.

  Who was this poet who could sell 10,000 copies of a single volume in London in one day, yet later be called nothing more than a hack imitator? What did it cost him to become the most popular American poet of his era? And what does it mean that the United States has never quite made up its mind about him? To understand Longfellow is to understand something difficult about how a culture decides which voices endure and which it quietly sets aside.

• 2. Roots and Ambitions

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  Peleg Wadsworth, Longfellow's maternal grandfather, was a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Member of Congress. The young Henry grew up partly at Peleg's farm in Hiram, Maine, and partly in Portland in the house that became known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House on Congress Street. His mother's line traced back to Richard Warren, who crossed on the Mayflower. His father was a lawyer. The family was old New England through and through.

  Longfellow was enrolled by age six at the private Portland Academy, where he earned a reputation for being exceptionally studious and became fluent in Latin. His mother introduced him to Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, books that pushed him toward foreign places and foreign tongues. He was named after his mother's brother Henry Wadsworth, a Navy lieutenant who had died at the Battle of Tripoli three years before the poet was born.

  At 15, Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where his grandfather had been a founder and his father a trustee. It was there he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became a lifelong friend. By the time he graduated in 1825 he was ranked fourth in his class, had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and had already published nearly 40 minor poems. His senior-year letter to his father left no ambiguity about where his heart lay: "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres in it."

• 3. Languages and Loss Abroad

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  Longfellow boarded the ship Cadmus in May 1826, beginning a three-year tour of Europe that cost his father $2,604.24. He traveled through France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England, learning French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German mostly without formal instruction. In Madrid he spent time with Washington Irving, who impressed him deeply with his work ethic and encouraged the young Longfellow to keep writing.

  Spain also brought grief. While Longfellow was still abroad, he learned that his favorite sister Elizabeth had died of tuberculosis at the age of 20 in May 1829.

  The professorship he had been groomed for at Bowdoin was waiting when he returned, but Longfellow found the $600 salary inadequate for the work required. The trustees raised it to $800 and added $100 more for one hour a day as the college librarian. His first published book, a translation of the medieval Spanish poet Jorge Manrique, appeared in 1833. He was translating textbooks, writing travel pieces, and growing increasingly restless. "I hate the sight of pen, ink, and paper," he wrote. "I do not believe that I was born for such a lot. I have aimed higher than this."

  A second European trip followed after Harvard's president Josiah Quincy III offered him the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages in December 1834. His wife Mary, whom he had married in September 1831, accompanied him. In October 1835 she suffered a miscarriage during the journey, about six months into her pregnancy. She did not recover and died on the 29th of November, 1835, at the age of 22. Longfellow had her body placed in a lead coffin inside an oak coffin and shipped to Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston. He wrote to a friend: "One thought occupies me night and day...She is dead - She is dead! All day I am weary and sad."

• 4. The Craigie House Years

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  Longfellow returned to the United States in 1836 and rented rooms at the Craigie House in Cambridge in the spring of 1837. The house had been built in 1759 and served as George Washington's headquarters during the Siege of Boston beginning in July 1775. Previous boarders had included Edward Everett and Jared Sparks. Longfellow would eventually live there for the rest of his life.

  His first poetry collection, Voices of the Night, appeared in 1839. Ballads and Other Poems followed in 1841, containing "The Village Blacksmith" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus", which were instantly popular. Publications called him one of the very few writers of his time who had put poetry to its best and sweetest uses. The Southern Literary Messenger placed him immediately among the first of the American poets. His friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described him as "our chief singer".

  Around this time Longfellow fell into what he called "periods of neurotic depression with moments of panic" and took a six-month leave from Harvard to attend a health spa in the former Marienberg Benedictine Convent at Boppard in Germany. His courtship of Frances Appleton, whom he had met in Thun, Switzerland, had stretched on for years. She had rebuffed him. He published the novel Hyperion in 1839, partly inspired by the failed courtship. Then, on the 10th of May, 1843, a letter arrived from Fanny agreeing to marry him. He was too restless to take a carriage and walked 90 minutes to reach her. Nathan Appleton, her father, bought the Craigie House as a wedding present. In his only love poem, the sonnet "The Evening Star" written in October 1845, Longfellow addressed her: "O my beloved, my sweet Hesperus! My morning and my evening star of love!"

• 5. Tragedy and the Beard

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  On the 9th of July, 1861, Frances Appleton was putting locks of her children's hair into an envelope and attempting to seal it with hot sealing wax while Longfellow napped nearby. Her dress caught fire. Exactly how it started was disputed even within the family. Longfellow's youngest daughter Annie claimed decades later that there had been no candle or wax and that a self-lighting match on the floor had been the cause. Whatever the source, Longfellow woke and rushed to her. He tried to smother the flames with a rug, but it was too small. He stifled the fire with his own body. She was taken to her room; a doctor was called; she was given ether. She died shortly after 10 the following morning, the 10th of July, after requesting a cup of coffee.

  Longfellow's burns were severe enough that he could not attend her funeral. His facial injuries prevented him from shaving. He wore a beard from that point on, and it became his trademark.

  He never fully recovered. He occasionally used laudanum and ether to manage his grief. He wrote to a friend that he was "inwardly bleeding to death" and begged "not to be sent to an asylum". Eighteen years later, in 1879, he wrote the sonnet "The Cross of Snow" to mark the anniversary of her death: "Such is the cross I wear upon my breast / These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes / And seasons, changeless since the day she died." The poem was never published in his lifetime.

• 6. Translation and Tribute

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  Starting in 1864, Longfellow invited a regular group of friends to his home every Wednesday to help him refine his translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The "Dante Club", as it was called, regularly included William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton. The full three-volume translation appeared in the spring of 1867 and went through four printings in its first year.

  In 1845 he had already published The Poets and Poetry of Europe, an 800-page anthology of translations by other writers, including many by his friend Cornelius Conway Felton. His stated goal was to bring together scattered English translations "not accessible to the general reader". Harvard recognized this legacy in 1994 by establishing the Longfellow Institute, dedicated to literature written in the United States in languages other than English.

  By 1868, Longfellow's annual income had surpassed $48,000. In 1874, Samuel Ward helped him sell the poem "The Hanging of the Crane" to The New York Ledger for $3,000, which was at that time the highest price ever paid for a poem. That same year, Longfellow oversaw a 31-volume anthology called Poems of Places. Ralph Waldo Emerson told him directly: "The world is expecting better things of you than this... You are wasting time that should be bestowed upon original production." Longfellow was unmoved, or at least unbowed.

• 7. Fame, Ridicule, and Reinstatement

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  Edgar Allan Poe wrote to Longfellow in May 1841 calling his work a source of "fervent admiration" and declaring him "unquestionably the best poet in America". Within a few years, Poe had pivoted entirely, accusing Longfellow in what Poe's own biographers called "The Longfellow War" of being "a determined imitator and a dextrous adapter of the ideas of other people", specifically Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The accusations may have been a circulation stunt for the Broadway Journal, which Poe edited at the time. Longfellow declined to answer publicly, but after Poe's death he wrote that he had attributed the harshness only to "the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong".

  Walt Whitman called him an imitator of European forms but praised his ability to reach ordinary readers, calling him "the expressor of common themes - of the little songs of the masses". Margaret Fuller found him "artificial and imitative". Lewis Mumford said Longfellow could be removed from literary history without much effect. Scholar Bliss Perry countered that criticizing him at the height of his fame was treated almost like a criminal offense.

  In 1884, two years after his death, Longfellow became the first non-British writer honored with a commemorative bust in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey in London. He remains the only American poet represented there with a bust. The king of Italy offered him the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, but Longfellow declined, explaining that he "did not think it appropriate for a Republican and a protestant to receive a Catholic order of knighthood". In 2020, author Nicholas A. Basbanes published Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, defending him as "the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history". The children of Cambridge had already offered a different verdict decades earlier: when the chestnut tree celebrated in "The Village Blacksmith" was cut down, they had the wood made into an armchair and presented it to the poet himself.