Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow was a powerful figure in the cultural life of nineteenth century America. Born in 1807, he had become a national literary figure by the 1850s and a world-famous personality by the time of his death in 1882 Longfellow attended Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, where he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, his lifelong friend and literary colleague. After graduation in 1825 and three years of touring and study in Europe, he assumed the professorship of modern languages then a relatively new field at Bowdoin. His publishing record (six foreign language textbooks in as many years) finally earned him a similar post at Harvard in 1834, beginning his long association with the city of Cambridge.Longfellow published his first poem at age thirteen in the Portland Evening Gazette a precocious sign of an astounding literary career as editor, anthologist, translator, playwright, novelist, and, above all, poet.
His many published works sold in phenomenal numbers and multiple editions. Most important are Ballads and Other Poems (1841), Poems on Slavery (1844), Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1867) and Keramos (1878). One of Longfellow's favorite metaphors is the backward glance. People in the present look back into their distant pasts and make a discovery. What had once been history political, conflicted, sad and bloody could now be seen as imaginative myth: ordered, noble and a source of strength. Longfellow wrote for a young nation ready to make this backward glance. The Indian, the Puritan, the Acadian had all, seemingly, sacrificed their identities on America's stage. In return they would become our originating legends. It was Longfellow's genius and unique opportunity that supplied his country with its mythic past. He did so in a supple lucid verse: moody, melodic and filled with moral tenderness. For this he was loved.
