Biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Complete biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, U.S.A. in 1807. He was educated at Bowd in and Harvard. Later he became professor of Modern Languages in Harvard University. He travelled extensively and visited France, Spain, and Germany. He spent most of his life (eighteen years) as a professor in Harvard. This was the fertile period of his poetic genius.

Longfellow was extremely active as the Popularize of foreign literatures; particularly by means of his extensive translations A huge collection of these, Poets and Poetry of Europe, appeared in 1845. Later, a translation of The Divine Comedy (1867-70) gave a new impulse to the study of Dante in America. It also inspired some sonnets which are among Longfellow's best works.

Longfellow is the most widely popular poet that America has produced and though critics to day place little value on The Village Blacksmith, The Wreck of the Hesperus, and The Children's Hour, These poems and others with the same simple and sentimental quality continue to be widely read and loved. In his longer narrative poems Longfellow applied some of the forms and techniques of European literature to themes from the history and legends of his own country.

Thus Evangeline (1847) is inspired by the Hermann and Dorothea of Goethe, and The Song of Hiawathe (1855) is designed to be a Kalevala of the American Indian. The popularity of these poems was enromous; few poems have caught, on like Paul Rever's Ride (1861) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) sold ten thousand copies in a single day.

Longfellow's faults are obvious enough. He is imitative, moralizing, and inclined to sentimentality. His versification is smooth and effortless to the point of weariness, and his ideas flout decoratively on the surface of things. His great virtue is his humility. His poems seldom pretend to be more than they are sincere morality pleasantly expressed, good tales agreeably versified, and the everyday joys and sorrows of human life lovingly ornamented. Longfellow's is not the highest type of poetry, but in its own class it is unsurpassed.

Longfellow died on March 24, 1982