Who is henry wadsworth

Longfellow held these oppositions together by keeping his poetry's energies oriented toward his readers. In other words, the popular success of this often self-contradictory poet may have been possible only because the United States in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was such a conflicted place.

Longfellow managed to speak to the conflicts and at the same time to seem a safe haven, an anchor in the storm. Longfellow's benign poetic temperament owes much to his full and fortunate life. Born in Portland in , when that bustling port city was still part of Massachusetts, Longfellow came from an old, established family of lawyers, judges, and generals.

Enrolled at Bowdoin College by the age of fourteen, during his senior year Longfellow published no less than sixteen poems in a leading literary journal, the United States Literary Gazette.

Upon his graduation the Bowdoin trustees his father conveniently happened to be one! He stayed for four, returning to Maine to start his teaching career in His next years were productive ones, and his ambition, hard work, and social connections paid off when in , at the age of 28, he was offered the most prestigious position in his field what we would now call "Comparative Literature" that the country had to offer: the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard.

Granted a year to travel in Europe before taking up his duties, Longfellow was in Rotterdam with his wife Mary Potter Longfellow when she suffered a miscarriage and died from its complications. Distraught, he continued to drift through Europe for the rest of the year. Installed at last in Cambridge in the fall of , the major, most productive and important phase of his life was about to begin. This phase was marked by his return, after an almost ten year interruption, to writing poetry.

His breakthrough poem, "A Psalm of Life," published in the Knickerbocker magazine out of New York and reprinted in newspapers across the country, stirred a generation of readers with its heady exhortations:. Life is real!

Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than today.

With the publication in of his first collection of poems, Voices of the Night, and that same year of his novel Hyperion, Longfellow established himself as one of America's leading authors.

Still in his early thirties, a well-dressed, cosmopolitan figure in small-town Cambridge, Longfellow formed close friendships with other young men of patrician backgrounds and promising futures, and turned his attention to the daughter of a prosperous Boston industrialist, Fanny Appleton , whom he had met for the first time in Switzerland in the summer of Unusually determined as a suitor, Longfellow waited seven long years before she relented, and the two were married in As a wedding present her father, Nathan Appleton, bought the couple the historic Craigie House on Brattle Street, a short walk from Harvard Square Longfellow had been renting rooms there since , and the house came on the market at a fortuitous moment.

Henry and Fanny raised five children in Craigie House, and lived among friends and family in great comfort, happiness, and privilege. It is revealing of the Longfellows' elite social position, for instance, that in Fanny became the first woman in America to be given anesthesia during childbirth. Moderate in politics, liberal in religion, Professor Longfellow and his wife surrounded themselves with art, music, and books. They had dinner parties, kept up wide-ranging correspondences, and spent their summers by the shore in Nahant.

Meanwhile, Longfellow's literary career prospered and his fame spread. In this matter of his career, Longfellow must never be confused for a private citizen, a solitary scrivener, alone in his attic pouring forth his soul.

Rather, throughout his writing life Longfellow had behind him the powerful New England establishment, of which as a Harvard professor and world-famous author, he became a leading representative. He counted among his friends the influential figures of the day in culture, politics, and society, and he in turn could be counted on to voice irreproachably respectable ideals grounded in moral decency and concern for the public good.

As an avatar of the emerging Boston culture industry, Longfellow was not just a moral emblem but a profitable venture: his books sold extraordinarily well. He wrote prolifically, and his publishers — first Ticknor and Fields, later Houghton Mifflin — were constantly bringing out new volumes and new editions of his collected poems, at all different price points for different segments of the expanding book trade.

Longfellow was frequently profiled in newspapers and magazines, and the release of poems like The Song of Hiawatha in and The Courtship of Miles Standish in were "events" shrewdly orchestrated to maximize sales.

Even in his own lifetime, therefore, Longfellow was larger than life, an institution associated with an array of ideological, social, and commercial interests. Longfellow was often happiest when paying least attention to such matters, but his public aura forms a scrim against which his private self must be seen. Longfellow's domestic happiness was shattered in , when his wife Fanny died of burns after fire engulfed her from a candle accidentally knocked over as she was melting wax to seal locks of her children's hair.

A widower once again, never to remarry, Longfellow continued to raise the children — the oldest was fourteen, the youngest five at the time of the tragedy — and, perhaps to drown his grief, continued to write: lyric poems, the narrative poems collected in Tales of a Wayside Inn, verse dramas, and his landmark three-volume translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.

His impressive output never slowing down, in the last decade of his life Longfellow published five new collections of poems, as well as assorted other writings. By the time he died, aged 75, in March , at his home in Cambridge, he had become a national elder, a white-bearded eminence whose Jove-like image was widely circulated in lithographs and photographs.

Sarah Orne Jewett captured something of the importance of Longfellow in the national imagination when she wrote in eulogy, "It is a grander thing than we can wholly grasp, that life of his, a wonderful life. This world could hardly ask any more from him: he has done so much for it, and the news of his death takes away from most people nothing of his life. His work stands like a great cathedral in which the world may worship and be taught to pray, long after its tired architect goes home to rest.

Longfellow, sporting long hair, yellow gloves, and flowered waistcoats, cut quite a romantic, European-style figure in what was then a provincial village of 6, Before long, Longfellow was the American literary darling of the world, an iconic figure whose fame stretched across the planet.

Some of his fans made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in scholarship. Between and , Longfellow received 20, letters — many of them from fans — and was said to have answered every one. His reputation as a poet, which had taken some critical sniping in his own day, faded fast, then faced a hundred-year barrage of scorn. Some of it came from fellow poets, whose emerging modernist sensibilities demanded that poems be inward and difficult.

Ezra Pound, a grandnephew of Longfellow, was said to be embarrassed by the family connection. Scorn also came from a new generation of university scholars eager to establish a canon of American literature grounded in idiosyncratic voices Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard. They can see the study where the Dante Club met and where — a month before his final illness — Longfellow received his last literary visitor, Oscar Wilde.

His work earned him a professorship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow would produce some of his best work such as Voices of the Night, a collection of poems including Hymn to the Night and A Psalm of Life, which gained him immediate popularity.

Due to budget cuts, he covered many of the teaching positions himself. One of the early practitioners of self-marketing, Longfellow expanded his audience becoming one of the best-selling authors in the world. In the last 20 years of his life, Longfellow continued to enjoy fame with honors bestowed on him in Europe and America. Longfellow also experienced more sorrow in his personal life.

In , a house fire killed his wife, Fanny, and that same year, the country was plunged into the Civil War. His young son, Charley, ran off to fight without his approval.

In March , Longfellow had developed severe stomach pains caused by acute peritonitis. With the aid of opium and his friends and family who were with him, he endured the pain for several days before succumbing on March 24, Longfellow married Mary Storer Potter, also from a distinguished family.

Before he began at Harvard, they traveled to northern Europe. While in Germany, Mary died following a miscarriage, in Devastated, Longfellow returned to the United States seeking solace.

He turned to his writing, channeling his personal experiences into his work.