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 We
haven’t had one of these weekly sermons devoted to the works of
a single poet for quite some time: the last was Tennyson,
back in December. I think it’s time to look at America’s most
popular poet of the 19th century (I quote Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia
of Literature) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was born on
February 27th, 1807 in Portland, which was then in Massachusetts,
but is now in Maine; and died March 24th, 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This is very close to Tennyson (1809 – 1892) and Robert
Browning (1812 – 1889), about whom I have written earlier
articles.
His father
was Stephen Longfellow, and his mother was Zilpah Wadsworth. Both
the Wadsworths and the Longfellows were in the upper class in
New England; his Wadsworth grandfather was a general, and his
Longfellow grandfather was a judge. His father was educated at
Harvard, and practiced law. Henry attended Bowdoin College in
Brunswick, Maine from 1821 to 1825. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804
– 1864) attended Bowdoin at the same time, and the two had known
each other slightly there. They maintained a long-term acquaintance,
with infrequent exchanges of ideas and opinions. However, on Hawthorne’s
death, Longfellow wrote an elegy
that is regarded as one of his best poems, and it will be the
first of the Poems of this week.
 On
graduating from Bowdoin, Longfellow was invited to become Professor
of Modern Languages there. With his heritage, his father had originally
hoped that he might take up law, but it was clear that was not
going to happen; the option of becoming a teacher was acceptable,
and his father paid for him to spend some time in Europe in preparation.
He traveled to Spain, France, and Germany over the period 1826
– 1829. In 1831 he married Mary Storer Porter. He was offered
a position at Harvard, with the opportunity to visit Europe again;
and in 1834 he returned there, principally to Germany and Scandinavia.
Sadly, his wife died in childbirth on November 29th, 1835, in
Rotterdam. In 1836 he returned to take up his Professorship at
Harvard.
By this time
he had added Finnish and Swedish to the languages he already knew.
He succeeded Ticknor as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages,
a position he held until 1854, when he resigned to devote himself
to writing. In 1843 he married Frances Appleton, after a lengthy
courtship (it is said she had reservations about his habit of
using his private life experiences in his poems). She also died
tragically in 1861: the light summer dress she was wearing caught
fire, and she was enveloped by flames (a not unusual occurrence
in those days of hoop skirts and open fires). In his attempts
to save her, Longfellow was so badly burned that the scars on
his face made it necessary for him to grow a beard. He was left
with six children from his two marriages. Much of his poetry is
domestic in character, and a lot of it is for and about children:
The Children’s Hour was very popular, and although it has
been said that “the intent of the poem is modest” it is also remarked
that “the achieved tone is such that few parents cannot honestly
share it”. Here are the two opening stanzas:
Between
the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to
lower,
Comes a point in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s
Hour.
I hear
in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
He developed
a considerable reputation as a writer of textbooks and as a translator.
Strangely, his translations of poetry, and particularly of German
poetry are generally regarded as somewhat pedestrian. However,
his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published between
1865 and 1867, is considered one of the most notable translations
to that time, and he wrote six sonnets on Dante that are among
his finest poems.
However,
all of this really leads us to a key problem in assessing Longfellow’s
place in poetry. Norman Holmes Pearson wrote a perceptive review
of Longfellow in The University of Kansas City Review in
1950, remarking that “Longfellow stands as a symbol of all that
is derivative and all that is kitsch in nineteenth-century American
letters”; but he goes on to say that “Taken by and large Longfellow
is what he has said to have been: derivative, sentimental, and
minor. But there is no reason why we should continue to take him
‘by and large’, if he can appear to better advantage.” He then
goes on to say “It is questionable whether any of even the most
moderately critical sensibilities of Longfellow’s own age regarded
him as a major poet in terms of the achievements of poetry. Yet
they recognized, what we are not always presently willing to admit,
that to be good minor poet is an excellence.”
Arnold Bennet
referred to him as the “chief minor poet of the English language”.
I think this
is exactly right. It is easy to extract parts of Longfellow’s
poems that are very good; but the poems as a whole usually fall
short. He himself remarked:
“If the
state of society is shadowed forth in its literature, then this
literature must necessarily represent two distinct and strongly
marked characters: one, of the castle and the court; another,
of the middle classes and the populace; - the former, elegant,
harmonious, and delicate; the latter, rude, grotesque, and vulgar.
Each of these classes has its own peculiar merits; but our manuscripts……..have
led us insensibly into the habit of confounding the manners
of the court with those of the city.”
I have a
collection, Evangeline and Selected Tales and Poems, which
was published by Signet Classic in 1964. The collection was by
Horace Victor Gregory (1898 – 1982), who also wrote a perceptive
introduction. The book includes extracts of two commentaries on
Longfellow by Van Wyck Brooks (1886 – 1963); the first of these
extracts dates from 1936, and the second from 1944: these were
my sources for some of the details in this piece. He comments
on Longfellow’s popularity, and reports that “As his fame spread
like the morning sun over the English-speaking peoples, with its
notes of domestic affection and the love of the sea, of landscape
and legend……ten thousand copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish
were sold in London in a single day”. This was in 1858. He also
says, in a footnote, that John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) wrote to Longfellow
after he had visited England “I had many things to say about the
sense I have of the good you might do this old world by staying
with us a little, and giving the peaceful glow of your fancy to
our cold, troubled, unpeaceful spirit. Strange, that both you
and [Charles Eliot] Norton [1827 – 1908] come as such calm influences
to me and others.”
Longfellow's
last visit to Europe (1868-69) was a triumphal tour during which
he received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. In
1884, two years after his death, he became the first American
to be honored with a bust in the Poets' Corner of Westminster
Abbey, London.
Recently,
in a piece here about workers,
I quoted Longfellow’s very famous poem (to all American schoolchildren,
anyway!) The Village Blacksmith, which begins:
Under a
spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
Of this kind
of ‘worker poems’ I remarked: “This last, though, is typical of
the ‘bucolic paradise’ kind of writing, which does not address
the true issues of the working class!”
Another famous
poem is Paul Revere’s Ride which ends:
For, borne
on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
Others have
remarked on the comparison of this poem with other ‘horse ride’
poems, such as Browning’s How
They Brought The Good News From Ghent to Aix, and The
Diverting History of John Gilpin; Showing How He Went Farther
Than He Intended, and Came Safe Home Again by William
Cowper (1731-1800). Both of these are popular poems in their own
right, though in my opinion Browning’s is greatly superior as
a poetic construction. Cowper’s is aiming at the same popular
audience as much of Longfellow’s work. All three, in their own
light, are excellent poems, of course!
It is not
possible to write about Longfellow without mentioning The Song
of Hiawatha, which he completed in 1854. The research for
this drew from two pioneer anthropologists, Heckewelder and Schoolcraft;
and in addition he cultivated the friendship of an Ojibway chieftain
to ‘catch the flavor of oral tradition in Indian mythology.” (Gregory).
The form of the poem is based on the Finnish Kalevala.
Gregory says:
“The flaws in the long work are obvious enough. Caught up in the
rhythm he adopted for the poem, Longfellow fell victim to echoing
redundancies and banal repetitions. It was part of the price he
had to pay for his facility in playing by ear.”
However,
one has to say, again with Gregory, that “the overall design of
the poem should not be so far underrated as it has been.”
The poem
ends with Hiawatha’s Departure, and here are the last lines:
Thus departed Hiawatha,
Hiawatha the Beloved,
In the glory of the sunset,
In the purple mists of evening
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the blessed,
To the Kingdom of Ponemah,
To the Land of the Hereafter!
In addition
to the elegy on Hawthorne,
I have decided to select two other poems for this week. The first
of these is the sonnet he wrote eighteen years after the death
of his second wife, Frances, The
Cross of Snow; the second is a poem written around 1860,
and is concerned with Longfellow’s memory of childhood. It is
My Lost
Youth.
I hope you
like these poems. He is a minor poet, as these things are measured;
but he was a very good minor poet, and as Norman Holmes Pearson
pointed out, this in itself is an excellence.
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