The couple had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood, and the marriage gave him new confidence. In , he published Evangeline, a book-length poem about what would now be called "ethnic cleansing.
In , Longfellow decided to quit teaching to devote all his time to poetry. Both books were immensely successful, but Longfellow was now preoccupied with national events.
With the country moving toward civil war, he wrote " Paul Revere's Ride ," a call for courage in the coming conflict. A few months after the war began in , Frances Longfellow was sealing an envelope with wax when her dress caught fire. Despite her husband's desperate attempts to save her, she died the next day. Profoundly saddened, Longfellow published nothing for the next two years. Later, he produced its first American translation.
Tales of a Wayside Inn, largely written before his wife's death, was published in When the Civil War ended in , the poet was fifty-eight. His most important work was finished, but his fame kept growing. In London alone, twenty-four different companies were publishing his work. His poems were popular throughout the English-speaking world, and they were widely translated, making him the most famous American of his day. From to , Longfellow published seven more books of poetry, and his seventy-fifth birthday in was celebrated across the country.
But his health was failing, and he died the following month, on March When Walt Whitman heard of the poet's death, he wrote that, while Longfellow's work "brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows," he was the sort of bard most needed in a materialistic age: "He comes as the poet of melancholy, courtesy, deference—poet of all sympathetic gentleness—and universal poet of women and young people.
I should have to think long if I were ask'd to name the man who has done more and in more valuable directions, for America. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. To prepare his son for the job, Stephen Longfellow stepped up to finance a lengthy trip to Europe.
Henry crossed the Atlantic in and made his way straight to Paris, where he procured a claret-colored waistcoat and various other dandyish accessories. From there he travelled to Spain, Italy, and Germany.
He spent more than three years abroad, assuring his increasingly skeptical parents that he was learning loads. No doubt he treated some of this time as a lark—spring break in the Eternal City.
Yet he returned home in with a remarkable command of French, Italian, and Spanish. This qualified him, in an after-the-fact manner, for his post at Bowdoin—and prepared the ground for his role as the first great internationalist of American letters.
Longfellow was bored at Bowdoin, where he taught for the next six years. He cranked out textbooks on French and Italian grammar and despised his life in the sticks. Gradually, though, his spirits began to lift. In he married Mary Potter, the cultivated daughter of a Portland judge, which took the edge off his rural isolation. And then he was offered the escape he was hoping for—the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard.
There was only one stipulation: he would have to return to Europe to solidify his grasp of German. Longfellow was jubilant. He departed with Mary in April, , and after stops in England and Denmark they proceeded to the Netherlands.
As planned, he immersed himself in one language-learning adventure after another. But in early October, Mary, who was pregnant, had a miscarriage, followed by an infection.
A grieving widower adrift in Europe, Longfellow numbly went about his appointed task, vacuuming up more languages he came to know fifteen. He did not wish to let go of his sorrow—an honest admission from a ruined man, who may have felt that he had little else. There would be another marriage, a beloved family, a steady ascent to fame and fortune as a poet. Just not quite yet. The agent of this transformation was Fanny Appleton, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Boston textile magnate.
Brilliant, beautiful, as book-besotted as her future husband, she was clearly hard to resist. She seems to have found him a harmless nerd, whose idea of a good time was to read aloud from his own journals or to translate German ballads on the fly with Fanny supplying some of the best lines.
When Longfellow left, in August, to take up his Harvard appointment, Fanny seemed almost surprised by her sense of loss. But he was captivated by her.
After she returned to America with her family, in , he bombarded her with notes, books, articles, and a pair of castanets—this last gift ushering in a long period of silence. The strange fact is that Fanny kept Longfellow waiting for seven years. Yet even this four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page billet-doux failed to move her. Then something happened. Basbanes, having dived deep into the unpublished journals and correspondence of both parties, comes up empty-handed. He had published short poems since his teen-age years, in newspapers and magazines.
Both showed his metric ingenuity, his deep acquaintance with European literature, and a weakness for Romantic mush that was frequently offset by his lightness of touch:. So blue yon winding river flows, It seems an outlet from the sky, Where waiting till the west wind blows, The freighted clouds at anchor lie. But now his domestic happiness emboldened him to try his hand at more ambitious projects. He was henceforth not merely a poet but a creator of American mythology—which Americans, in what many still regarded as a history-starved wilderness, bought by the cartload.
His contemporaries mostly adored his books. An American poem, with the lack of which British reviewers have so long reproached us.
He is not tepid either, but always vital with flavor, motion, grace. His reputation as a poet, which had taken some critical sniping in his own day, faded fast, then faced a hundred-year barrage of scorn.
Some of it came from fellow poets, whose emerging modernist sensibilities demanded that poems be inward and difficult. Ezra Pound, a grandnephew of Longfellow, was said to be embarrassed by the family connection. Scorn also came from a new generation of university scholars eager to establish a canon of American literature grounded in idiosyncratic voices Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard.
They can see the study where the Dante Club met and where — a month before his final illness — Longfellow received his last literary visitor, Oscar Wilde. He regularly gave money to ex-slaves and to black churches, but disliked speaking out except through his writing. Literary life was an aspiration Longfellow embraced early on, while still a child in Portland, Maine, where he was born on Feb.
This year, a series of celebrations throughout New England will burn ardently for Longfellow, including concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and tours. The message: Longfellow was more than his image.
0コメント