Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Siblings
    7
    No. of Spouses
    2
    No. of Children
    6
    Family
    Stephen Longfellow (father), Zilpah Wordsworth Longfellow (mother), Mary (first wife), Francis Appleton (second wife)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Bowdoin College, ME
    Occupation
    Educator
    Writer or Artist
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Unitarian or Universalist

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Longfellow's literary reputation, like [Alfred] Tennyson's, has suffered from the inevitable changes in poetic style and taste. He has been called too didactic, but when he began writing he was widely blamed for sacrificing uplift to purely aesthetic considerations. "A Psalm of Life" (1839) seems one of his poorest poems, but his contemporaries, including the French poet Charles Baudelaire, found it deeply moving. An impatient reader and writer, Longfellow wanted everything stated as quickly and as plainly as possible, not left to implication and inference. Yet he was a scholar and far less simple than his work suggests. He admired the primitive, and in his Indian poems and elsewhere he introduced important native materials into American literature. Yet he also played an important part in establishing modern languages in the American educational curriculum, and he labored valiantly to introduce American readers to large aspects of the literature and art of Europe, encouraging them to enter into the common cultural inheritance of Western culture.
    Edward Wagenknecht, "Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01015.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Blue, Frederick J. “The Poet and the Reformer: Longfellow, Sumner, and the Bonds of Male Friendship.” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 273-297. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/12870.