Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

A young Longfellow. Picture from http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/143

Longfellow was appointed to professor at the age of eighteen at Bowdoin, just as his father Stephen Longfellow was pressuring him to enter law school. Like many up and coming writers, his passion for literature did not blind him to the fact that a literary career in America at the time was not a lucrative one. Later, he began a professorship at Hardvard University. He was one of the first in America to teach Faust and Goethe.

Newton Arvin suggests that Longfellow’s works is influenced by a religious liberal framework, “…undogmatic, eclectic, latitudinarian, and rather vague” (Arvin, 10).

Our studies so far in the Romantics, especially in Blake, have shown the reoccurring theme re-capturing the innocence of youth. Arvin argues that this quality of Longfellow’s poetry makes him an American writer, “Longfellow would not have been so representative an American writer as he was if he had not now and then sounded the note of nostalgia - nostalgia for his own charmed boyhood and aspiring youth”(196). Although such notions of innocence and youth are definitely not exclusive to American writers of that period, it does support Longfellow as a figure in the American Romantic movement.

Longfellow became close friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it was Hawthorne who gave him the theme for one of Longfellow’s most famous works, Evangeline. In it, Evangeline searches for her love in New England, and this search brings her in contact with the wilderness.

The opening of Evangeline demonstrates a vivid engagement with nature through personification of the forest:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it

Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?

(http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/books/longfellow/evangeline00.html)

Works consulted: Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. 1963.