Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, then part of Massachusetts and later the largest city in the new state of Maine ^[1]. He was the second of eight children of Stephen Longfellow, a lawyer who served a term in Congress, and Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow, whose father, General Peleg Wadsworth, had fought in the Revolutionary War ^[1]. The boy grew up within sight of Casco Bay, and the harbor, the wharves, and the sea shanties of Portland surface repeatedly in his later verse, most memorably in the poem 'My Lost Youth' ^[2].

He learned quickly. Enrolled at the Portland Academy at age six, he published his first poem, a patriotic ballad about a battle at Lovell's Pond, in the Portland Gazette when he was thirteen ^[1]. In 1821 he entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, an institution his father had helped to found as a trustee. Among his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became a lifelong friend ^[3].

At Bowdoin, Longfellow wrote steadily, placing poems and essays in national magazines while still a teenager. He graduated fourth in his class in 1825 ^[1]. His father wanted him to read law, but the college offered the eighteen-year-old graduate something better suited to his gifts: a newly created professorship of modern languages, on the condition that he first travel to Europe to prepare himself ^[3].

Longfellow spent three years abroad, from 1826 to 1829, wandering through France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. He learned languages by living among their speakers, boarding with families, filling notebooks, and reading widely ^[3]. In Madrid he met Washington Irving, then at work on his life of Columbus, and the older writer's example encouraged Longfellow's own literary ambitions ^[2].

He returned to Bowdoin in 1829 and taught there for six years, writing his own textbooks because none existed for the subjects he covered. He translated a Spanish verse text by Jorge Manrique and published 'Outre-Mer', a book of travel sketches modeled loosely on Irving's manner ^[2]. In 1831 he married Mary Storer Potter of Portland ^[1].

Harvard came calling in 1834 with the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages, and again a European tour preceded the appointment. This second journey ended in grief. In Rotterdam in November 1835, Mary died following a miscarriage. She was twenty-two ^[1]. Longfellow pressed on to Germany and Switzerland, studying German literature in his mourning, and during this period he met Frances Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy Boston industrialist, who would eventually become his second wife ^[4].

He began teaching at Harvard in 1836 and settled in Cambridge, taking rooms at Craigie House, a Georgian mansion that had served as George Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston in 1775 and 1776 ^[4]. There his fame began. 'Voices of the Night' (1839), containing 'A Psalm of Life', found an enormous audience, and 'Ballads and Other Poems' (1841) added 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' and 'The Village Blacksmith' to the American memory ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the 1850s would have received a simple answer: the most famous poet in the English-speaking world after Tennyson, and possibly ahead of him in sales. His long narrative poems reached audiences that no American writer had touched before ^[2]. 'Evangeline' (1847), a tale in hexameters of lovers separated during the British expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia, went through multiple printings in its first year ^[3]. 'The Song of Hiawatha' (1855), drawing on Ojibwe traditions recorded by the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and using a trochaic meter borrowed from the Finnish Kalevala, sold tens of thousands of copies and was parodied, recited, and set to music across two continents ^[2]. 'The Courtship of Miles Standish' (1858) reportedly sold thousands of copies in Boston and London on its first day ^[3].

Among Henry Wadsworth Longfellow achievements, his shorter poems arguably outlasted the epics. 'Paul Revere's Ride', published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861 as tensions before the Civil War reached their peak, turned a Massachusetts silversmith into a national icon; historians have spent generations correcting its liberties precisely because so many Americans learned their Revolution from it ^[5]. 'The Children's Hour', 'Excelsior', and 'The Building of the Ship' entered schoolbooks and stayed there for a century.

His scholarly work mattered too. In 1842 he published 'Poems on Slavery', a modest but public alignment with the antislavery cause ^[4]. And between 1865 and 1867 he issued the first complete American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, in unrhymed triple verse, refined at weekly Wednesday evening meetings of what became the Dante Club, where James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton reviewed his proofs ^[6]. The translation helped found Dante studies in the United States; the Dante Society of America, organized in 1881 with Longfellow as its first president, grew directly from those gatherings ^[6].

Longfellow courted Frances Appleton for seven years. She refused him for most of that time, and he walked from Cambridge to her family's house on Beacon Hill often enough that friends joked about the route. She accepted him in 1843, and her father, Nathan Appleton, bought Craigie House for the couple as a wedding present ^[4]. The marriage was by all accounts a happy one. Six children were born, five of whom lived to adulthood: Charles, Ernest, Alice, Edith, and Anne Allegra, the trio of daughters affectionately catalogued in 'The Children's Hour' as grave Alice, laughing Allegra, and Edith with golden hair ^[4].

The household ran on hospitality. Dickens visited, as did Emerson, Sumner, and a steady stream of European travelers who considered the poet a required stop on any American tour. Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator, was probably his closest friend ^[4].

Tragedy ended the marriage in July 1861. Frances was sealing envelopes of her daughters' hair with melted wax when her dress caught fire. Longfellow, trying to smother the flames with his own body, was badly burned on his face and hands; Frances died the next morning ^[4]. He grew the beard now familiar from his portraits partly to cover the scarring, and he carried the loss for the rest of his life. Eighteen years afterward he wrote 'The Cross of Snow', a sonnet about her death so private that it was published only after his own ^[2].

Longfellow had resigned his Harvard professorship in 1854 to write full time, and the years after Frances's death were productive despite his grief ^[3]. 'Tales of a Wayside Inn' (1863), a cycle of narrative poems told by travelers gathered at a real tavern in Sudbury, Massachusetts, opened with 'Paul Revere's Ride' and confirmed his gift for the framed story collection ^[2]. The Dante translation occupied much of the decade, along with the verse dramas collected as 'Christus: A Mystery' in 1872.

The war touched his family directly. His eldest son Charles ran off to join the Union Army in 1863 without his father's blessing and was severely wounded at the Mine Run campaign in Virginia that November. The news reached Cambridge in late 1863, and the poem Longfellow wrote that Christmas, 'Christmas Bells', later became the carol 'I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day' ^[4].

Honors accumulated in his final two decades. Oxford and Cambridge awarded him honorary degrees during his 1868 to 1869 tour of Europe, and Queen Victoria received him at Windsor ^[3]. On his seventy-fifth birthday in 1882, schoolchildren across America marked the day with recitations of his work. He died at Craigie House on March 24, 1882, of peritonitis, and was buried beside both of his wives at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge ^[1]. Two years later a memorial bust of Longfellow was placed in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, the first American writer so honored ^[3].

Longfellow's reputation has traveled a strange arc. During his lifetime his popularity was almost without precedent for a poet: his books sold in numbers usually reserved for novels, his birthday was a school holiday in some districts, and translations carried his work into dozens of languages ^[2]. Then modernist critics of the early twentieth century turned on him, dismissing the smooth meters and moral clarity that Victorian readers had loved. For decades he was more quoted than studied.

Recent scholarship has been kinder, treating him as a serious cultural mediator who imported European forms, built an American audience for poetry, and used his fame for causes including abolition and international copyright ^[5]. His role as a translator and teacher of modern languages made him one of the founders of comparative literature in the United States ^[6].

The physical traces of his life are easy to find, which is one reason readers still seek out Henry Wadsworth Longfellow facts and pilgrimage sites. Craigie House is preserved by the National Park Service as the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site ^[4]. His boyhood home's city, Portland, maintains the Wadsworth-Longfellow House through the Maine Historical Society ^[1]. A bridge over the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge bears his name, and lines he wrote, from 'ships that pass in the night' to 'into each life some rain must fall', circulate in everyday English spoken by people who have never read a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow biography. Few writers dissolve so completely into the language of their country ^[2].