Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born on this day in 1807, was the most revered poet of his day, but his reputation later collapsed. Why was he so beloved to begin with?
went to a funeral. As the elderly writer stared into the open casket, he grew perplexed. He could not identify the body. He seemed to know that the man had been a friend—indeed, he felt sad that the bearded stranger in the casket had predeceased him—but Emerson had no idea who he was. “Who is the sleeper?” he finally asked his daughter. The answer was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In the biographies of literary talents, the father is often viewed as the heavy, crushing the life out of his sensitive child. But Stephen Longfellow happened to be right. At the time, the self-sustaining American writer was a rare thing. So a compromise was fashioned, presumably with familial help. Longfellow, who had just graduated from Bowdoin at eighteen, was offered a chair at the college in modern European languages.
A grieving widower adrift in Europe, Longfellow numbly went about his appointed task, vacuuming up more languages . “There are wounds which are never entirely healed,” he wrote his sister-in-law. He did not wish to let go of his sorrow—an honest admission from a ruined man, who may have felt that he had little else. But the central drama of his life, and certainly the narrative at the heart of Basbanes’s biography, was about to begin.
Then something happened. We don’t know exactly what—and that is striking, given that the two were such ceaseless chroniclers of their own lives. Basbanes, having dived deep into the unpublished journals and correspondence of both parties, comes up empty-handed. What is clear is that in 1843, four years after ridiculing the love offering that was “Hyperion,” Fanny crossed Longfellow’s path at a party and they decided to get married.
Longfellow’s protagonist is an Ojibwa superman: he brings peace to his people, and teaches them to grow corn and jot down their thoughts in a pictographic alphabet. In this sense, he is cast as a modernizer, turning noble savages into solid citizens.
Still, the vagaries of taste have performed their dismal magic. So much of his work seems dull, shopworn, generic. The Victorian music is there, sometimes gloriously, but just as often on the best toy piano you ever heard. It waswho characterized Longfellow as “Tennyson without gin.” That’s about right—he is, except in his very best work, only mildly intoxicating, the equivalent of near beer.
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