Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• 1. A Boy From Portland

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  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on the 27th of February 1807 in Portland, Maine. He grew up in a house that now stands as a historic site called the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. His father Stephen worked as a lawyer while his mother Zilpah came from a family with deep roots in American history. Her brother Henry Wadsworth had died three years earlier at the Battle of Tripoli. This loss shaped the name given to the newborn boy.

  The young Longfellow attended a dame school when he was only three years old. By age six he enrolled at the private Portland Academy where he earned a reputation for being very studious. He became fluent in Latin during those early years. His mother encouraged his love for reading by introducing him to Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote.

  He published his first poem at age thirteen in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November 1820. The four-stanza piece was titled The Battle of Lovell's Pond. It was a patriotic and historical work written by a child who would soon leave home for college. In the fall of 1822 fifteen-year-old Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

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• 2. Three Years Abroad

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  After graduating from Bowdoin in 1825 Longfellow received an offer to teach modern languages at his alma mater. An apocryphal story suggests that trustee Benjamin Orr hired him on the condition that he travel to Europe to study French Spanish and Italian. Whatever the catalyst he began his tour of Europe in May 1826 aboard the ship Cadmus.

  His time abroad lasted three years and cost his father $2,604.24 which equals over $67,000 today. He traveled through France Spain Italy Germany and England before returning to the United States in mid-August 1829. While overseas he learned five languages mostly without formal instruction including Portuguese and German.

  In Madrid he spent time with Washington Irving who impressed him with his work ethic. Irving encouraged the young Longfellow to pursue writing seriously. While in Spain Longfellow received sad news that his favorite sister Elizabeth had died of tuberculosis at age twenty in May 1829. The loss weighed heavily on him during these formative years.

• 3. The Weight Of Loss

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  On the 14th of September 1831 Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter a childhood friend from Portland. They settled in Brunswick but were not happy there. In December 1834 he received an offer from Josiah Quincy III president of Harvard College to take the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages. The position required him to spend a year or so abroad studying additional languages.

  During this trip his wife Mary suffered a miscarriage about six months into her pregnancy. She did not recover and died after several weeks of illness at age twenty-two on the 29th of November 1835. 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.

  He wrote: One thought occupies me night and day...She is dead , She is dead! All day I am weary and sad. Three years later he was inspired to write the poem Footsteps of Angels about her. Several years later he wrote Mezzo Cammin which expressed his personal struggles in his middle years.

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• 4. Epic Poems And Translations

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  Longfellow returned to the United States in 1836 and took up the professorship at Harvard. He rented rooms at the Craigie House built in 1759 which served as George Washington's headquarters during the Siege of Boston beginning in July 1775. Elizabeth Craigie owned the home and rented rooms on the second floor where previous boarders included Jared Sparks and Edward Everett.

  His first major poetry collection Voices of the Night appeared in 1839 followed by Ballads and Other Poems in 1841. The latter included The Village Blacksmith and The Wreck of the Hesperus which were instantly popular. In November 1847 he published Evangeline for the first time just months after the birth of his daughter Fanny who became the first child born with ether anesthesia in the United States.

  He spent several years translating Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy inviting friends to meetings every Wednesday starting in 1864. This group known as the Dante Club regularly included William Dean Howells James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. The full three-volume translation was published in the spring of 1867 but Longfellow continued to revise it.

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• 5. A Divided Reception

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  Fellow Portland native John Neal published the first substantial praise of Longfellow's work in the 23rd of January 1828 issue of his magazine The Yankee. He wrote As for Mr. Longfellow he has a fine genius and a pure and safe taste. The Southern Literary Messenger immediately put Longfellow among the first of our American poets.

  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. His friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called him our chief singer who wins and warms kindles softens cheers and calms the wildest woe.

  Contemporaneous writer Edgar Allan Poe later publicly accused Longfellow of plagiarism in what biographers call The Longfellow War. Poe wrote that Longfellow was a determined imitator and a dextrous adapter of the ideas of other people specifically Alfred Lord Tennyson. Margaret Fuller judged Longfellow artificial and imitative while Walt Whitman considered him an imitator of European forms.

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• 6. Monuments And Memory

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  Longfellow became one of the first American celebrities and was popular in Europe. It was reported that 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish sold in London in a single day. Children adored him; The Village Blacksmith's spreading chestnut-tree was cut down and converted into an armchair presented to him by Cambridge children.

  In 1884 Longfellow became the first non-British writer for whom a commemorative bust was placed in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in London. He remains the only American poet represented with a bust there. A public monument by Franklin Simmons was erected in his birthplace of Portland Maine in September 1888.

  His children donated land across Brattle Street facing the family home to the City of Cambridge which became Longfellow Park. A monument featuring bas reliefs of characters from his works including Evangeline and Hiawatha was dedicated in October 1914. In February 1940 and March 2007 the United States Postal Service issued stamps commemorating him.

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