Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. He achieved a level of national and international prominence previously unequaled in the literary history of the United States and is one of the few American writers honored in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey—in fact, he is believed to be the first as his bust was installed there in 1884. Poems such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), and “A Psalm of Life” were mainstays of primary and secondary school curricula, long remembered by generations of readers who studied them as children. Longfellow’s achievements in fictional and nonfictional prose, in a striking variety of poetic forms and modes, and in translation from many European languages resulted in a remarkably productive and influential literary career. His celebrity in his own time, however, has yielded to changing literary tastes and to reactions against the genteel tradition of authorship he represented. Even if time has proved him something less than the master poet he never claimed to be, Longfellow made pioneering contributions to American literary life by exemplifying the possibility of a successful authorial career, by linking American poetry to European traditions beyond England, and by developing a surprisingly wide readership for Romantic poetry.
At present, however, Longfellow has been relegated to the status of an historically interesting minor poet whose poems occupy only a few pages in recent anthologies and do so in ways that obscure the reasons for his original popularity. Now that fiction and cinema have all but replaced poetry as storytelling media, the narrative poems that accounted in large measure for Longfellow’s appeal to his contemporary readers are represented in anthologies by only a few short examples, such as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “Paul Revere’s Ride”—poems that make Longfellow seem more narrowly New England in his perspective than would “The Saga of King Olaf” or Hiawatha among his longer poems or “The Skeleton in Armor” or “The Leap of Roushan Beg” (1878) among the shorter ones. Whereas 19th-century readers had savored the sentimental charms of “The Children’s Hour,” readers of today look for personal confessions of a sort Longfellow held in reserve; two sonnets particularly admired today for their courageous yet artistically controlled revelations of personal pain, “Mezzo Cammin” and “The Cross of Snow” (composed 1879), both appeared posthumously. In his own time one of Longfellow’s chief contributions to American literature was the encouragement he offered to aspiring writers—whether those Boston-Cambridge-Concord literati with whom he interacted through his various clubs or those such as Emily Dickinson, who responded gratefully to him from a distance as the champion of poetry in an otherwise prosaic American society, the Pegasus in the pound of Yankee bookstores. 20th-century poets such as Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, and Howard Nemerov have been kinder to Longfellow than literary critics and historians. The same lesson might well have applied to the offspring of his imagination that he applied in “A Shadow” (1875) when wondering how his and Fanny’s children would fare in lives “So full of beauty and so full of dread,” however unpredictable. “The world,” he concluded with characteristic serenity, “belongs to those who come the last, / They will find hope and strength as we have done.”