Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century. The author of The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline and Paul Revere's Ride, he gave the young United States a poetry of its own landscapes and legends, and was read as widely in Britain as at home.
Works
Voices of the Night, Ballads and Other Poems, The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, The Song of Hiawatha
Portland and Bowdoin
Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, then part of Massachusetts and now in Maine, the son of a lawyer. He entered Bowdoin College at fifteen, where Nathaniel Hawthorne was a classmate, and published poems in magazines while still a student.
On graduating he was offered a new chair of modern languages at Bowdoin, on condition that he first study in Europe. He spent three years in France, Spain, Italy and Germany, learning the languages he would teach and translate all his life.
Harvard and fame
In 1836 he became professor of modern languages at Harvard and settled in Cambridge, in the Craigie House, which had been George Washington's headquarters. His first collection, Voices of the Night (1839), with A Psalm of Life, made him famous; Ballads and Other Poems followed in 1841.
Evangeline (1847), on the deportation of the Acadians, The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) sold in huge numbers. In 1854 he gave up teaching to live by his pen, one of the first American writers able to do so.
Grief and Dante
His first wife, Mary, died in 1835 after a miscarriage during their journey in Europe. His second wife, Fanny Appleton, died in 1861 when her dress caught fire; Longfellow was badly burned trying to save her, and grew the beard by which he is remembered to hide the scars.
To steady himself he translated Dante's Divine Comedy, published in 1867, the first complete American translation. He died in Cambridge on 24 March 1882. Two years later he became the first American poet honoured with a bust in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Anecdotes
The burnt beard
After his wife Fanny's death in a fire in 1861, Longfellow's face was too scarred for him to shave. The full white beard he grew became his public image, and most portraits of him show it.
A chair from a chestnut tree
When the chestnut tree of his poem The Village Blacksmith was cut down in Cambridge in 1876, local schoolchildren paid for an armchair made from its wood and gave it to Longfellow for his seventy-second birthday. It is still in his house.
Frequently asked questions
What are Longfellow's best-known poems?
The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, Paul Revere's Ride, The Village Blacksmith, A Psalm of Life and The Courtship of Miles Standish.
Where did Longfellow live?
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1837 until his death, in a house now kept as the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site.
Did Longfellow translate Dante?
Yes. His translation of the Divine Comedy appeared in 1867 and was the first complete one made in the United States.