It’s the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), who thanks to such narrative poems as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863) was the most popular American poet of his century (sorry, Walt Whitman), though his work is now recognized as less profound than that of other American poets such as, oh, I don’t know, Walt Whitman. Thanks to his sometimes rollicking choice of meter—trochaic tetrameter—Longfellow was possibly also the most parodied poet of his century. Basically, if you were literate in the 19th century, you were reading Longfellow; if you were at all inclined toward poetry and/or snark, you were parodying him. Even Lewis Carroll did this, publishing in 1857 his parody, Hiawatha’s Photographing. (But my personal favorite: The Song of Hakawatha by British computer scientist Mike Shields, which begins with Part I, The Logging-in of Hakawatha. Read it here.)

Longfellow was born in Portland, Massachusetts, which is now Portland, Maine. (Maine used to be part of Massachusetts and had to campaign for its independence for 35 years after the Revolutionary War before becoming a state. Good thing we have a second grader at home because I clearly need to relearn all this.) Longfellow entered Bowdoin College in 1822 at the tender age of 15; classmates included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce. Longfellow was already writing poems and essays and was so gifted at languages that he was offered a professorship at Bowdoin in modern languages and sent to Europe to become proficient in French, Spanish, and Italian.

In 1829 Longfellow returned to the States and took up his professorship, and in 1831 he married; his wife died in 1835 after a miscarriage, and the grieving Longfellow spent a year in Germany (because nothing cheers a person up like German literature). On his return, he settled in at Harvard and continued writing. He published a volume of poetry in 1839, Voices of the Night, which was a huge hit, and that same year published a novel about his travels in Europe (Hyperion). Evangeline, about two lovers separated when the British drove the French from Nova Scotia, was another hit, and in 1854 Longfellow quit teaching to write full time.

Longfellow had remarried in 1843 and had an extremely happy second marriage that produced six children. He continued to write and publish and be incredibly popular; The Courtship of Miles Standish came out in 1858. Sadly, his second wife died in 1861 after her dress accidentally caught fire. Longfellow suffered severe burns trying to save her. Interestingly, this is why he grew his famous white beard. (Longfellow has one of the greatest visages in American history. Just LOOK at him. He’s right up there with Frederick Douglass.) Heavily depressed, Longfellow focused on translating Dante’s Divine Comedy and produced a very respectable translation, also writing six sonnets on Dante now considered some of his greatest poems.

Longfellow died at 75, and two years later a memorial bust of him was placed in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey—he was the first American to receive this honor.

Longfellow’s poem “The Children’s Hour” begins:

Between the dark and the daylight,

When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,

That is known as the Children’s Hour.

 

I hear in the chamber above me

The patter of little feet,

The sound of a door that is opened,

And voices soft and sweet.

(Read the rest here.)

Have another beautiful, cold, snow-globe sort of Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.