Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. His original works include the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and "Evangeline". He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.
Longfellow was born in Portland, District of Maine, Massachusetts (now Portland, Maine). He graduated from Bowdoin College and became a professor there and, later, at Harvard College after studying in Europe. His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841).
He retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing, and he lived the remainder of his life in the Revolutionary War headquarters of George Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. His second wife, Frances Appleton, died in 1861 after sustaining burns when her dress caught fire. After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on translating works from foreign languages. Longfellow died in 1882.
Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. He has been criticized for imitating European styles and writing poetry that was too sentimental.
Life and work
Early life and education
Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, to Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow in Portland, Maine, then a district of Massachusetts. He grew up in what is now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. His father was a lawyer, and his maternal grandfather was Peleg Wadsworth, a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Member of Congress. His mother was descended from Richard Warren, a passenger on the Mayflower. He was named after his mother's brother Henry Wadsworth, a Navy lieutenant who had died three years earlier at the Battle of Tripoli. He was the second of eight children.
Longfellow was descended from English colonists who settled in New England in the early 1600s. They included Mayflower Pilgrims Richard Warren, William Brewster, and John and Priscilla Alden through their daughter Elizabeth Pabodie, the first child born in Plymouth Colony.
Longfellow attended a dame school at the age of three and was enrolled by age six at the private Portland Academy. In his years there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin. His mother encouraged his enthusiasm for reading and learning, introducing him to Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. He published his first poem in the Portland Gazette on November 17, 1820, a patriotic and historical four-stanza poem called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond". He studied at the Portland Academy until age 14. He spent much of his summers as a child at his grandfather Peleg's farm in Hiram, Maine.
In the fall of 1822, 15-year-old Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, along with his brother Stephen. His grandfather was a founder of the college and his father was a trustee. There Longfellow met Nathaniel Hawthorne who became his lifelong friend. He boarded with a clergyman for a time before rooming on the third floor in 1823 of what is now known as Winthrop Hall. He joined the Peucinian Society, a group of students with Federalist leanings. In his senior year, Longfellow wrote to his father about his aspirations:
I will not disguise it in the least...the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres in it...I am almost confident in believing, that if I can ever rise in the world it must be by the exercise of my talents in the wide field of literature.
He pursued his literary goals by submitting poetry and prose to various newspapers and magazines, partly due to encouragement from Professor Thomas Cogswell Upham. He published nearly 40 minor poems between January 1824 and his graduation in 1825. About 24 of them were published in the short-lived Boston periodical The United States Literary Gazette. When Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin, he was ranked fourth in the class and had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He gave the student commencement address.