4.33 avg rating 57 ratings. About Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She married Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet, buried at this cem.) Returning to Maine in summer 1829, Longfellow as a young professor soon found himself immersed in the unpoetic routines of pedagogy. (Even The Birds of Killingworth was adapted from an English story.) He sailed from New York to Le Havre in May 1826 and spent the next three years rambling through Europes cities and countrysides, absorbing impressions of cultures and places, living with families in Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and developing linguistic fluency. After a brief period of boarding on Professors Row in Cambridge, Longfellow found lodging in the Craigie mansion on Brattle Street, occupying the room that had once been George Washingtons headquarters. Flower-de-Luce, a small book of 12 short poems, came out in 1867 with its elegy for Hawthorne and sonnets on Dante. Wife of Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Fanny Longfellow (1817-1861), wife of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was a skilled artist and was well-read in many subjects. All day I am weary and sad". [119] He was such an admired figure in the United States during his life that his 70th birthday in 1877 took on the air of a national holiday, with parades, speeches, and the reading of his poetry. He was still writing learned essays for the North American Reviewthis time concentrating attention on Teutonic languages, including Swedish and early English. "[129] Lewis Mumford said that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect. Hiawatha introduces his tribe to agriculture through his encounter with the corn god Mondamin, to transportation by inventing the birch canoe, and to picture-writing. In the book, Myles fancied Priscilla but was too shy to tell her . [75], Longfellow was devastated by Frances death and never fully recovered; he occasionally resorted to laudanum and ether to deal with his grief. For immediate publication, in three months beginning late in 1857 he composed the title poem for The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems (1858). Resuming friendship with Fanny and Mary Appleton and their brother Tom, Longfellow was crushed by Fannys rejection of his 1837 marriage proposal. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Longfellow met Boston industrialist Nathan Appleton and his family in the town of Thun, Switzerland, including his son Thomas Gold Appleton. Longfellow's father was eager to have his son become a lawyer. 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. Several years later, he wrote the poem "Mezzo Cammin," which expressed his personal struggles in his middle years.[43]. The Tales of a Wayside Inn, modeled roughly on Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales and published in 1863, reveals his narrative gift. [35] The couple settled in Brunswick, but the two were not happy there. thou art happy' 10. 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.
Though its account of Reveres ride is historically inaccurate, the poem created an American legend. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. [125] Longfellow did not respond publicly but, after Poe's death, he wrote: "The harshness of his criticisms I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong". Classic and contemporary poems for the holiday season. [135] As a friend once wrote, "no other poet was so fully recognized in his lifetime". Marion 2. The Divina Commedia group of six sonnets written between 1864 and 1866 honor the Tuscan poet Dantemost memorably the first, with its image of the bereaved American poet leaving my burden at this minster gate, / Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray in a quest for spiritual peace. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 . After falling in love with 17-year-old Frances Appleton, Longfellow returned to Heidelberg to escort Marys friend Clara Crowninshield home to the US. from. [123] He wrote that Longfellow was "a determined imitator and a dextrous adapter of the ideas of other people",[122] specifically Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The book spread like wildfire in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Always a writer at heart, when Henry wasn't in school he and his childhood friend, William Browne, planned . [60], On May 10, 1843, after seven years, Longfellow received a letter from Fanny Appleton agreeing to marry him. It was reported that 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish sold in London in a single day. While readily dismissing Edgar Allan Poes charges of plagiarism, they acknowledged that Longfellow lacked the originality evident in Whitman, Emerson, and even Poe. [109] Emerson was disappointed and reportedly told Longfellow: "The world is expecting better things of you than this You are wasting time that should be bestowed upon original production". Long after his death in 1882, however, these neglected later works were seen to contain some of his most effective writing. Longfellow attended a dame school at the age of three and was enrolled by age six at the private Portland Academy. Other libraries with Longfellow materials include the Bowdoin College Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Boston Public Library; the Pierpont Morgan Library; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Library of Congress; the Clifton Wallen Barrett Library, University of Virginia; the Henry E. Huntington Library; the Parkman Dexter Howe Library, University of Florida; and the University of Washington Library. [102] He was inspired, for example, by Norse mythology for "The Skeleton in Armor" and by Finnish legends for The Song of Hiawatha.[103]. Match. Among the shorter poems of his late career, Longfellows sonnets are especially prized. [32], He published the travel book Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea in serial form before a book edition was released in 1835. Although Paul Reveres Ride and The Birds of Killingworth, the most familiar of these poems today, give an impression of New England focus, the great majority had European settings and sources. Longfellow and Mary Potter were married in September 1831. Hyatt Waggoner observed the irony of Longfellows having been most appreciated in his own time for A Psalm of Life, noting that though it intends to mean that life is worth living after all, what it effectively does mean is that life must be worth living but the poet cant think why.
On the Continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused to settle down to a regimen of scholarship at any university. 1860. Born on February 27, 1807, in Portland (while Maine was still a part of Massachusetts), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grew up in the thriving coastal city he remembered in My Lost Youth (1856) for its wharves and woodlands, the ships and sailors from distant lands who sparked his boyish imagination, and the historical associations of its old fort and an 1813 offshore naval battle between American and British brigs. When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835. Longfellow died in 1882. He has been presented as a gentle, placid, poetic soul, an image perpetuated by his brother Samuel Longfellow who wrote an early biography which specifically emphasized these points. [11] He studied at the Portland Academy until age 14. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth , D.C.L. Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, to Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow in Portland, Maine,[1] then a district of Massachusetts. [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". He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. Each new book extended his fame, and he was bombarded with invitations for literary contributions and for autographs. [6], Longfellow was descended from English colonists who settled in New England in the early 1600s. Birth Year: 1807. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was an attorney and a Harvard graduate active in public affairs. In his own time one of Longfellows chief contributions to American literature was the encouragement he offered to aspiring writerswhether those Boston-Cambridge-Concord literati with whom he interacted through his various clubs or those such as Emily Dickinson, who responded gratefully to him from a distance as the champion of poetry in an otherwise prosaic American society, the Pegasus in the pound of Yankee bookstores. [50] The Southern Literary Messenger immediately put Longfellow "among the first of our American poets". Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. 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. [105], He was important as a translator; his translation of Dante became a required possession for those who wanted to be a part of high culture. Request a transcript here. Why did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow write a Psalm of Life? His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). 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". I have aimed higher than this". Fanny Longfellow took pride in her husbands growing reputation and actively assisted him. His fathers book collection provided literary models of a neoclassical sort, and family storytelling acquainted him with New England lore dating to pilgrim days. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. and cease repining; Behind the cloud is the sun still shining; Thy fate is a common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall." Longfellow is rightrain comes at different times to all of us. Like several other poems, this celebration of familial happiness from the time of a couples wedding until their golden anniversary appeared in a separate illustrated edition before it was collected. Post by libraryanne February 6th, 2011, 2:42 pm. [75] Longfellow had burned himself while trying to save her, badly enough that he was unable to attend her funeral. That poem appeared in one of those assemblages of short poems, identified as Birds of Passage, that Longfellow introduced in The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems and returned to frequently in subsequent volumes. 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 . Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), grew up in the house and went on to become one of the most famous men of his time. Created by. Their children were: Alice Mary born in about 1850, Ernest Wadsworth born in about 1845, Charles Appleton born in about 1844, Fanny born in about 1847 and died in 1848, Edith born in 1853, and Anne Allegra born in 1855.
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. Children across New England are familiar with the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose "Paul Revere's Ride" has been recited at many a grade school pageant. Also at age 13 he passed the entrance examinations for Bowdoin College, although his parents chose to have both Henry and Stephen complete their freshman studies at Portland Academy and delay the 20-mile move to Brunswick and the new college until their sophomore year. Mrs. How many languages did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow speak? In his years there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. "[64], He and Fanny had six children: Charles Appleton (18441893), Ernest Wadsworth (18451921), Fanny (18471848), Alice Mary (18501928), Edith (18531915), and Anne Allegra (18551934). Despite some criticism of the Virgilian dactylic hexameter meter with which Longfellow experimented in Evangeline, the poem proved enormously successful. 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. The book met with only modest success while deepening Fannys estrangement, sparking considerable Boston gossip, and drawing mixed but often hostile responses from reviewers. But when Henry was a senior at Bowdoin College at 19, the college established a chair of modern languages. More important, Longfellow turned back to poetry after that second European journey and found encouragement in the warm reception of a group of poems he classified loosely as psalms. Although he never received any money from Knickerbockers, where several of these poems first appeared, Longfellow discovered an appreciative public response to the sad wisdom he had distilled from the disappointments of life; sadness empowered him to speak comforting, encouraging words to the many readers who responded gratefully to A Psalm of Life, The Reaper and the Flowers, The Light of Stars, Footsteps of Angels, and Midnight Mass for the Dying Year. He collected these and other early poems in Voices of the Night, like Hyperion published in 1839, and followed up on that success with Ballads and Other Poems (1842), which featured short narrative poems such as The Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hesperus, a character sketch that he thought of as another psalm titled The Village Blacksmith, and a poem of Romantic inspiration, Excelsior. He was exploring American subject matter in many of these poemseven in The Skeleton in Armor, which drew an unexpected link between medieval Scandinavian war songs and New England antiquities. Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. Like . [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". "End of Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." There should be 5 seconds silence at the end of the recording, or 10 seconds for files longer than 30 minutes. PAPERS: The chief repository of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's papers and manuscripts is the Houghton Library, Harvard University. tags: poetry. 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. 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how many languages did henry wadsworth longfellow speak