Volume 17 , Issue 40

Longfellow, The Poet

It is in The Princeton Union, in Princeton, Minnesota, Thursday, 21 February 1907, page 3, written by Robertus Love, that we find this article: "A Poet Who won The Hearts of His Countrymen." The serene and noble life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born a century ago (1807).

Found on Newspapers.com

The understandable poet whose writings appealed to the heart and uplift making - A ripe scholar, who won a worldwide fame - His culture was universal, not merely American.

Longfellow was born 1807, 27th day of February. He died twenty-five years ago (1882) the 24th day of March. For seventy-five years he lived a serene, studious and noble life. For fifty years he was honored beyond his own community. For forty years he was acknowledged as a poet, and for at least thirty years he knew the satisfaction of being proclaimed the greatest American poet.

During those thirty years of his mature manhood and declining age he was indisputably the most popular living writer of English verse. In general acceptance he surpassed Tennyson even in Tennyson's own land. In the United States his name was perhaps the first native household word.

A critic had called Longfellow "The poet of the obvious and the humdrum." Other critics had declared that Longfellow had no originality; that he borrowed his material from old world literature and merely changed its form. The critic first mentioned seems to think that Longfellow could not have been a great poet because he attended church regularly every Sunday and enjoyed the sermons. This gentleman apparently believed that to be a true poet one must defy all human conventions, as did Shelley and Byron - must be erratic and erotic. Longfellow lived a sober, decent, respectable life and won a worldwide fame while he was living it. He interpreted what you may call "the obvious and the humdrum," if you like, and he interpreted them i language both clear and poetic. He was the understandable poet.

Longfellow's theory was that poetry writing was the art of expressing thought rather than of concealing thought. He wrote to the great mass of the common people, the average men and women of the world, and they caught his message and were uplifted by it. They understood it. Verse in which select circles must delve and dig for a meaning is not poetry. The poetic is always the obvious. There is not a line in Longfellow which requires dissection to ascertain what is the matter with it. That is why ultra educated critics of a certain class decry the poetry of Longfellow. It presents no puzzles. The poetry shines in its face.

In 1892 there was published a list of a hundred translations of Longfellow's poems, complete or partial, into eighteen languages. In the same year the catalogue at the British museum enumerated 484 books under the name of Longfellow, including all relating to him. There were just three more books, or 487, relating to Tennyson. It had been said that Longfellow was more popular in England than Tennyson.

An unaffected natural simplicity was, in fact, the prevailing note in Longfellow's life as in his writings.

Longfellow was no infant prodigy. He wrote practically no poetry worth publishing until he was past thirty years of age. He was thirty-two when he wrote "The Psalm of Life," which first brought him fame. He finished "Evangeline" at forty, that being his first extended essay into poetic narrative. Most of his ambitious work was done after he passed the fortieth meridian. Nearly all his verse was the product of his mature life.

Until far into middle life the poet was "Professor" Longfellow. For nearly twenty years he occupied the chair of modern languages at Harvard, and for several years in his earlier manhood he had held a similar chair at Bowdoin, where in his nineteenth year he was graduated. During his professorship days he made two strips to Europe for the study of modern languages. Later he made two more trips for the study of modern conditions and just to see the world and broaden his experiences.

Longfellow said many things better than anybody else said them. He may not have spoken to the highly intellectual a message of prophecy or interpretation such as was spoken by Walt Whitman or by Emerson. These men appealed to the soul and Longfellow to the heart.They were metaphysical. Longfellow was emotional.

Longfellow's life was serene. For forty-five years he lived in one house, the old Cragie place on Brattle street, in Cambridge, one of those very numerous houses in New England "where George Washington slept. Longfellow had two sad bereavements, the death of his first wife in his youth while the couple were traveling and studying in England and the death of his second wife, many years thereafter, in the Cambridge home.
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