LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH (1807 188a), American poet, was born in Portland (Me.), on Feb. 27, 1807, of a family for generations domiciled in New England. After studying at a private school and at the Portland academy, he entered Bowdoin college, graduating there in 1825. Even as a boy he wrote prose and verse for newspapers and magazines, and showed an interest in native themes for literature and a talent for imitation of other poets, notably Bryant. He longed to be a man of letters, though his father disapproved. In 1826 he went to Europe to prepare himself to teach at Bowdoin, and when he re turned in 1829 he was elected professor of modern languages and librarian of the college. In 1831 he married Mary Storer Potter of Portland, a former schoolmate. In connection with his work as a teacher he did some text-book writing, translating, and editing of foreign texts, and wrote several essays on French, Italian and Spanish languages and literature. His Outre-Mer, a book of European sketches, came out in 1835, showing strongly Irving's influence though based on Longfellow's impressions during his first visit to the Old World. In 1834 he was offered the Smith professorship of modern languages at Harvard, then vacated by George Ticknor. He accepted and went abroad to study. After pleasant months in England, Sweden and Denmark, he met tragedy for the first time when Mrs. Longfellow died in Rotter dam, on Nov. 29, 1835.
He went alone to Germany and Switzerland, coming to Cam bridge to begin his work at Harvard in Dec. 1836. After a few months he took rooms at the historic Craigie House, which later became his own, and is now celebrated as the Longfellow House. His Hyperion, a prose romance, appeared in 1839, as did Voices of the Night, a volume of poems which won general favour and praise even from such critics as Poe. At Harvard he lectured on French, Spanish, Italian and German, apparently with success. In 1841 his Ballads and other Poems increased his celebrity as a poet. He was in Europe for part of the next year, and on the journey home prepared his Poems of Slavery (1842), his one considerable excursion into the field of contemporary social and political debate. Hawthorne wrote to him : "I never was more sur
prised than at your writing poems about slavery. . . . You have never poetized a practical subject hitherto." It is significant that, although Longfellow heartily opposed slavery, the ardent aboli tionists found his anti-slavery verse "perfect dish-water beside Whittier's." Margaret Fuller called Poems of Slavery "the thin nest of all Mr. Longfellow's thin books" and said, "The subject would warrant a deeper tone." In 1843, he married Frances Eliza beth Appleton, of Boston. The Spanish Student, a poetic drama, came out in book form in 1843 ; The Belfry of Bruges, another volume of verse, in 1846, and Evangeline, interesting as his first long poem on an American theme and as one of the better known compositions in English hexameters, in 1847. A novel, Kavanagh, praised by Emerson but not otherwise distinguished, was issued in 1849 ; and in 185o still another book of verse, The Seaside and the Fireside, was added to the list of his publications.
By 1854 he found teaching a burden, and resigned from Hare yard, turning his whole attention to poetry. Eight other volumes of short poems, most famous of which is his Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), were printed before his death. Hiawatha came out in 1855. It attempted to weave together the legends and tradi tions of the American Indians. The metre, trochaic dimeter, was suggested by the Finnish Kalevala. In 1858 he used hexameters for another American theme, The Courtship of Miles Standish.
The two most ambitious works of his later life were his transla tion of Dante's Divina Commedia, and his Christus, a trilogy, which he planned as his greatest achievement. He had begun to translate Dante in 1843. Christus, too, he began early. Though the whole poem did not appear till 1872, its three parts, The Golden Legend, a re-working of a mediaeval tale, The New England Trag edies, two dramas of Puritan America, and The Divine Tragedy, had already appeared as separate works.