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Even in his later years, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not mind birthdays. He inspired others to celebrate right along with him. His 70th, for example, took on the air of a national holiday, with parades, speeches and lots of his poetry. "My study is a garden of flowers," he wrote in his journal on February 27, 1877, with "salutations and friendly greetings from far and near" filling his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
By then, Longfellow was a celebrity of almost modern magnitude—"the object of a national adulation enjoyed by few poets before or since," according to Andrew R. Hilen, who edited a comprehensive edition of the poet's correspondence. He was dazzlingly prolific, equally adept at prose, drama and poetry, and a scholar as well; his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy was the first in America. He also had the good fortune to come along just as the United States was forming a distinctive cultural identity. "Longfellow did as much as any author or politician of his time to shape the way 19th-century Americans saw themselves, their nation and their past," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Today, only people of a certain age can recall the Longfellow poetry they memorized as schoolchildren, perhaps passages from "Paul Revere's Ride" or "The Wreck of the Hesperus" or "The Village Blacksmith." Many more speak of "the patter of little feet" or "ships that pass in the night," or declare, "I shot an arrow into the air" or "Into each life some rain must fall," without realizing that those words, too, are his. If his contemporaries celebrated him as an American bard, subsequent generations pushed him to the margins as a relic.
Yet in the light of his 200th birthday this month, Longfellow is looking fresh once again. A Library of America edition of his selected writings, published in 2000, has gone through four printings, with close to 37,000 copies in print. To celebrate his bicentennial, the U.S. Postal Service has issued a commemorative stamp—the second to bear his likeness; Herman Melville is the only writer similarly honored. Longfellow was not a "stuffy Victorian," says Christoph Irmscher, curator of a bicentennial exhibit of rare books and other artifacts at Harvard University's Houghton Library. Rather, he was a highly motivated writer who "worked hard to professionalize the business of literature and to earn his status as America's first—and most successful to date—celebrity poet." In his ambition, in his approach to fame and in his connection with his audience, Longfellow can seem, even now, quite contemporary.
He could have been a country lawyer like his father, Stephen, who represented Maine in Congress from 1823 to 1825, but Henry had other ideas. "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres on it," he wrote home during his senior year at Bowdoin College.
Born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, he would cite Washington Irving's Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon as the most influential book of his youth. By the time he was 13, he was reading Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, John Milton, Alexander Pope and Edward Gibbon; he had even published his first poem, "The Battle of Lovell's Pond," in the Portland Gazette. His Bowdoin acquaintances included Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become a lifelong friend, and Franklin Pierce, who would become the 14th president of the United States.
After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1825, Longfellow spent three years in Europe learning French, Italian, Spanish, German and Portuguese, then five years teaching European languages at Bowdoin and translating scholarly texts for classroom use. He had married Mary Storer Potter, a 19-year-old neighbor from Portland, in 1831. Three years later, Harvard College named him Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres.
To prepare for the job, Longfellow made another trip abroad, this time with Mary. Over the next two years he added Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Old Icelandic and Dutch to his repertoire. But he suffered a grievous loss as well: in 1835 Mary died in Rotterdam after a miscarriage. It wasn't until 1836 that Longfellow reported to Cambridge, eventually taking a room in an elegant old house on Brattle Street that had served as General Washington's headquarters during the Siege of Boston.
Comments
It's good to see this modest Longfellow revival now happening. Old enough to have memorized his lines as a schoolboy, I have watched as his reputation continued to decline during as modernist taste reached an apex during the twentieth century, but without surrendering my appreciation of him as I made my way to a literature Ph.D. and became an English professor. As the years passed and I watched literary taste give way to what Walter Ong called secondary orality as electronic technology began to eclipse the printed page, I began to believe that Longfellow was due to make a comeback. For all the change that I have witnessed across the twentieth century, especially in the way the United States has lost its youthful innocence as a nation, I believe that something quintessentially American remains and awaits a reawakening. Better than any American writer I can think of, including the great Walt Whitman, Longfellow exhibits that essence. For that reason he deserves to rediscovered and to reclaim his old visibility. Who knows, his work might even revive an old enthusiasm for poetry as a popular cultural medium, so that he sits side by side with Oprah and American Idol for sheer visibility and at the same time reminds us all of something that still defines us at our very best--something expressed not only in the quiet majesty of his stories and plays (yes, plays!) but in the magic of his language, which begs to be transmitted by the sound of a reader's voice. (Find someone who will listen and try reading him aloud.) These are things I hope to explore as I begin assembling a book about his work with the perspective of someone who has known and admired it for a long, long time.
Posted by Paul Zolbrod on May 2,2008 | 12:01AM