Famous Americans

A man with the gift of easy rhyme.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) grew up in a very eventful time in America. The country was fairly new with hardly any culture of its own yet, and the Civil War was looming. Unlike many poets of his era, Longfellow became famous while he was still living. He had a gift for rhyme and wrote many children’s nursery rhymes alongside his other works, and he became the most famous American of his day.

Early Life

Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine, which at that time was still part of Massachusetts. He was the second son of eight children. His mother, Zilpah Wadsworth, was the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero, while his father, Stephen Longfellow, was a Portland lawyer and then a member of Congress. Zilpah instilled his love of writing and reading from an early age as she would read aloud to him and his siblings exciting stories such as Don Quixote, a favorite of his. But the book that was his absolute favorite and that influenced him the most was Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.

“Every reader has his first book,” Longfellow wrote later in life. “I mean to say, one book among all others which in early youth first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me, the first book was the Sketch Book of Washington Irving.”

Like many fathers, Longfellow’s wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer, but that wasn’t going to be Henry’s path. While he was a senior at Bowdin College, at 19 years old, the college created a chair of modern languages and he was asked to become the first professor. The school said Longfellow would still be able to travel and study in Europe.

In May 1826, Longfellow did just that and traveled many European countries. He spent time in inns and cottages, talking to traders, peasants, and farmers. He returned to America in 1829 and began his career as a professor. He even had to write his own textbooks for his classes since there were none available for him to use at the time.

One day at Church, he ran into an old schoolmate of his, Mary Storer Potter. The two were later married in 1831. They settled down in a house surrounded by elm trees and he began working on translations from Old World literature. In 1834, he acquired a professorship at Harvard and he and Mary started traveling Europe. Unfortunately, his wife died in Rotterdam, and Longfellow returned home alone where he rented a room at the Craigie House, where he would spend the rest of his life.

Longfellow the Poet

While working at Harvard in 1836, Longfellow published his first collection of poems called Voices of the Night. He was 32 years old at the time. In 1841, he published Ballads and Other Poems. These early poems showed people who triumphed over hardship, and how a new, struggling nation, thrived. Unfortunately, his duties as a professor made it hard to find enough time to devote to his passion of writing. Plus, he had been courting a woman named Frances Appleton, who kept refusing his proposal of marriage.

Longfellow wrote and published Hyperion, a romance that predicted his love for Frances, and then he traveled again to Europe and wrote The Spanish Student, before returning to America. Finally, though, Frances agreed to marry him and the couple had six children. In 1847, he published Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, a poem that was as long as a book about how the British drove the French from Nova Scotia, and two lovers who were separated and then found each other years later just as the man was about to die. This is the ending verse of the book:

Still stands the forest primeval; but under the shade of its branches
Dwells another race, with other customs and language.
Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic
Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile
Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom.
In the fisherman’s cot the wheel and the loom are still busy;
Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun,
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline’s story,
While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean

In 1854, Longfellow resigned from his teaching at Harvard and focused on his writing. That year, he began The Song of Hiawatha, a long poem about the Ojibway Native Americans, and how the Great Spirit commanded his people to live in peace. It tells the story of how Hiawatha is born and ends it with Hiawatha’s death and the coming of the white man. This was the first time Indian themes gained recognition.

In 1861, Longfellow’s wife was sealing packages of their children’s hair with matches and wax – a common keepsake at the time. Tragedy happened when the wax burst into flame and she died the next day. He was devastated and threw himself into more scholarly work. In the following years, he was given honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, was invited by Queen Victoria to Windsor, and was called on by the Prince of Wales.

By his 75th birthday in 1882, Longfellow was celebrated across the country. He died just a month later on March 24. When poet Walt Whitman heard of it, he wrote that Longfellow’s work “brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows,” and that he was the kind of bard most people needed in such 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.”

1. Henry Longfellow was the most popular American in his day.
2. He had a gift of rhyme.
3. He wrote the first poem about Native Americans that was accepted in society at the time.