What Is There to Love About Longfellow?

What Is There to Love About Longfellow?

He was the most revered poet of his day. It’s worth trying to figure out why.

 

 

By James Marcus

New Yorker

June 1, 2020

 

 

After a century-old collapse, the poet’s reputation shows some signs of revival.Illustration by Carson Ellis

 

 

 

On March 26, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson 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.

 

Emerson was in the throes of dementia. Even so, the story seems like a small allegory of Longfellow’s disappearance from American culture. He was, in his heyday, the most famous poet in the English-speaking world. Perhaps T. S. Eliot, in his sports-arena-filling prime, would be a comparable figure. But Eliot was lionized by many people who didn’t read his poetry, whereas Longfellow’s books were devoured not only by the literati but by ordinary readers. When Longfellow was received by Queen Victoria, in 1868, she noticed the servants scuffling to get a glimpse of him. To her amazement, they all knew his poetry. No other visitor had provoked “so peculiar an interest,” she noted. “Such poets wear a crown that is imperishable.”

 

 

Yet Longfellow’s fame proved to be more perishable than expected. How did he reach the summit, and what explains the century-old collapse of his literary reputation, which now shows some flickering signs of revival? Nicholas Basbanes tells the tale with diligence, affection, and an occasional note of special pleading in “Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” (Knopf).

 

The poet was born in 1807 to a distinguished New England family in Portland, a hundred miles or so north of Boston. His father, Stephen Longfellow, served in both the state legislature and the U.S. Congress. His mother, the culture-loving Zilpah Longfellow, discussed literature with young Henry, warning him away from the obscurity he so admired in Thomas Gray’s odes. Poetry, she told him, must instruct and improve. He should avoid poems that “excite the imagination only”—a lesson he may have taken too much to heart.

 

At the age of fifteen, Longfellow was packed off to Bowdoin College, in nearby Brunswick. His family had considerable clout on campus: his grandfather had helped to found the school, and his father sat on its board of trustees. But this otherwise dutiful son already had some ideas of his own. “I hardly think Nature designed me for the bar, or the pulpit, or the dissecting-room,” he informed his father. In a subsequent letter, he added, “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature.” This got a predictably lukewarm reception from the elder Longfellow, who had himself trained as a lawyer and doubted whether his son could make a living as a writer. “There is not wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men,” he replied.

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.

 

The fruits of nepotism did not end with the gig itself. To prepare his son for the job, Stephen Longfellow stepped up to finance a lengthy trip to Europe. Henry crossed the Atlantic in 1826 and made his way straight to Paris, where he procured a claret-colored waistcoat and various other dandyish accessories. From there he travelled to Spain, Italy, and Germany. He spent more than three years abroad, assuring his increasingly skeptical parents that he was learning loads. No doubt he treated some of this time as a lark—spring break in the Eternal City. Yet he returned home in 1829 with a remarkable command of French, Italian, and Spanish. This qualified him, in an after-the-fact manner, for his post at Bowdoin—and prepared the ground for his role as the first great internationalist of American letters.

 

Longfellow was bored at Bowdoin, where he taught for the next six years. He cranked out textbooks on French and Italian grammar and despised his life in the sticks. “I suppose you think I am dead,” he wrote to a friend. “But it is not so; I am only buried—in Brunswick.”

Gradually, though, his spirits began to lift. In 1831 he married Mary Potter, the cultivated daughter of a Portland judge, which took the edge off his rural isolation. He reshuffled his European reminiscences into “Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea,” a hodgepodge travelogue in the vein of Washington Irving. And then he was offered the escape he was hoping for—the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard. There was only one stipulation: he would have to return to Europe to solidify his grasp of German.

 

Longfellow was jubilant. He departed with Mary in April, 1835, and after stops in England and Denmark they proceeded to the Netherlands. As planned, he immersed himself in one language-learning adventure after another. But in early October, Mary, who was pregnant, had a miscarriage, followed by an infection. She died on November 29th, after issuing a final plea to her husband: “Henry, do not forget me.”

 

A grieving widower adrift in Europe, Longfellow numbly went about his appointed task, vacuuming up more languages (he came to know fifteen). “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. There would be another marriage, a beloved family, a steady ascent to fame and fortune as a poet. Just not quite yet.

 

The agent of this transformation was Fanny Appleton, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Boston textile magnate. Brilliant, beautiful, as book-besotted as her future husband, she was clearly hard to resist. Basbanes seems almost as infatuated with her as his subject was, putting Longfellow on the back burner for twenty pages while he narrates Fanny’s European sojourn of the mid-eighteen-thirties.

 

What Fanny sought in a suitor, the author tells us, was “intellectual engagement above all else.” She had already batted away numerous candidates, and when she first encountered Longfellow, in Interlaken, Switzerland, in the summer of 1836, he did not strike her as a potential soul mate. “Mr L. very inquisitive,” she wrote in her diary one night, sounding a little fatigued. She seems to have found him a harmless nerd, whose idea of a good time was to read aloud from his own journals or to translate German ballads on the fly (with Fanny supplying some of the best lines).

 

When Longfellow left, in August, to take up his Harvard appointment, Fanny seemed almost surprised by her sense of loss. But he was captivated by her. After she returned to America with her family, in 1837, he bombarded her with notes, books, articles, and a pair of castanets—this last gift ushering in a long period of silence. The strange fact is that Fanny kept Longfellow waiting for seven years. He suffered bouts of depression, informing one friend that “a leaden melancholy hangs over me:—and from this I pass at times into feverish excitement, bordering on madness.” He took the bold step of publishing a novel, “Hyperion,” whose young lovers were plainly patterned on himself and Fanny, and made sure that she got a copy. Yet even this four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page billet-doux failed to move her. (In a letter to a friend, she dismissed it as “desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the Author’s mind.”)

 

 

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. Thus began what the groom called his “Vita Nuova of happiness.”

 

The marriage (including its agonizing preamble) altered the course of Longfellow’s career as a poet. He had published short poems since his teen-age years, in newspapers and magazines. His first volume of verse, “Voices of the Night,” appeared in 1839, followed by “Ballads and Other Poems,” in 1841. Both bundled together Longfellow’s own poems with his translations, suggesting that the two roles were virtually indistinguishable. Both showed his metric ingenuity, his deep acquaintance with European literature, and a weakness for Romantic mush that was frequently offset by his lightness of touch:

So blue yon winding river flows,
It seems an outlet from the sky,
Where waiting till the west wind blows,
The freighted clouds at anchor lie.

But now his domestic happiness emboldened him to try his hand at more ambitious projects. In 1845, he published “The Poets and Poetry of Europe,” a hefty anthology of translations (some of them done with Fanny) which was the first of its kind in America. That same year, Longfellow also set to work on “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.” Based on a folkloric nugget he borrowed from his Bowdoin classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne, it was published in 1847 and made Longfellow a national celebrity. He was henceforth not merely a poet but a creator of American mythology—which Americans, in what many still regarded as a history-starved wilderness, bought by the cartload. “Evangeline” went through six printings in a matter of months.

 

His contemporaries mostly adored his books. “I read your poems over and over,” Hawthorne gushed to the author after bingeing on “Voices of the Night” in 1839. “Nothing equal to some of them was ever written in this world.” The excitable John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about “Evangeline” in similar terms: “Eureka!—Here, then, we have it at last! An American poem, with the lack of which British reviewers have so long reproached us.” Even Walt Whitman, an unlikely fan, declared that “his influence is like good drink or air. He is not tepid either, but always vital with flavor, motion, grace.”

 

What, exactly, were his peers responding to? “Evangeline” is a good place to start. The poem is a verse narrative—a romance, really—built on a factual foundation: Britain’s expulsion of the Acadians from what are now the Canadian Maritime Provinces between 1755 and 1763. This was essentially an act of ethnic cleansing, and Longfellow is alert to the tragedy of the Acadian exile. But the engine of the poem is Evangeline’s search for her lover, Gabriel, dragged away by the British on a ship and dumped somewhere in the American outback. Her odyssey plays to Longfellow’s strengths as a pastoralist, on display in the famous first lines:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic . . .

In a typical move, Longfellow chose to write his North American epic in dactylic hexameters, a meter most commonly identified with ancient Greek and Latin verse. It can sound cumbersome to the contemporary American ear, less like poetry than like highly decorative prose—prose in its Sunday best. Still, there are many stretches where the dancing dactyls propel the narrative forward. For every moment of fustian (Longfellow never met an extended simile he didn’t like), there are surprising bits of lyricism: “Nearer and round about her, the manifold flowers of the garden / Poured out their souls in odors, that were their prayers and confessions.” And, lest we pigeonhole Longfellow as a nature guy, he is quick to supply a memorable couplet about an epidemic in Philadelphia: “So death flooded life, and, o’erflowing its natural margin, / Spread to a brackish lake, the silver stream of existence.” (To borrow Ezra Pound’s famous definition of literature, this is certainly news that stays news.)

 

So the original readers of “Evangeline” responded to its archaic music, its romantic agonies, and its endlessly unscrolling panorama of the New World. This last point helps to explain Whittier’s delight at having stumbled across an “American poem.” But how American was it? Like many post-colonials, Longfellow’s compatriots were battling over the question of national identity, with a good many factions in the mud pit. Some, like Emerson, argued that the ballast of European culture would need to be cast off—that the new nation should be made up from scratch. But Longfellow, with his vast mental reservoir of languages and literatures, felt otherwise. He was, as we now say, a globalist. Instead of Emerson’s slash-and-burn approach to America’s cultural patrimony, he preferred Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur—the idea that all poems and cultures were in constant, chattering, shape-shifting dialogue.

Longfellow took this cross-pollinating tendency to new heights in “The Song of Hiawatha.” “I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians,” he confided to his journal in 1854. He would “weave together their beautiful traditions into a whole.” As usual, he preferred an imported meter—in this case, the rapid-fire trochees and poetic architecture of the Finnish epic “Kalevala.” But Longfellow was determined to immerse himself in the particulars of Native American legend. He pored over Henry Schoolcraft’s ethnographic studies as well as an autobiography given to him by George Copway, an Ojibwa lecturer and erstwhile Methodist minister. The result was a world-spanning fantasia, unfolding in lines “so plain and childlike, / Scarcely can the ear distinguish / Whether they are sung or spoken.”

 

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. Yet Longfellow never strays from what he took to be the animism of the Ojibwa: what greater gift is there to a poet than a world in which every bird, tree, and insect has a soul? This means that the tiniest incident—say, the descent of crows upon a cornfield—takes on a Homeric heft:

Soon they came with caw and clamor,
Rush of wings and cry of voices,
To their work of devastation,
Settling down upon the corn-fields,
Delving deep with beak and talon,
For the body of Mondamin.

 

When it was published, in 1855, “The Song of Hiawatha” quickly outstripped “Evangeline” in its success, selling four thousand copies on its first day alone. There was a wealth of parodies, “made tempting,” as Basbanes notes, “by the tom-tom tempo of the meter.” But these, too, were a tribute to the poem’s pervasive presence in American popular culture, which eventually spawned not only related works of art but Hiawatha-branded tobacco, bicycles, dishes, Christmas stockings, soap, potato sacks, thermometers, and biscuit tins. Truly, Longfellow was everywhere. By the end of his life, as the scholar Bliss Perry pointed out, carping about this beloved icon was no more acceptable than “carrying a rifle into a national park.”

 

Then the worm turned. Not surprisingly, it was the modernists who ejected Longfellow from the pantheon, viewing his metrical sleekness and front-parlor gentility as the worst kind of Victorian dross. The critic Van Wyck Brooks delivered the death blow in 1915. “Longfellow is to poetry,” he declared, “what the barrel-organ is to music.” Reputations rise and fall and rise again, and many writers retreat into a kind of hibernation when they die, waiting for the warmth of renewed acclaim to bring them back to life. Yet Basbanes seems to take Longfellow’s banishment rather personally. In fact, he alleges a hit job. Longfellow, he insists, “was the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history—widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next.”

 

Come now. Many revered writers have dropped down the memory hole, including Longfellow’s peers William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell. For that matter, the passing decades have yielded additional reasons for Longfellow’s critical antagonists to beat him over the head. There is, for example, the matter of cultural appropriation and the big fat target that is “Hiawatha.” The poet would probably play the Weltliteratur card and move on. And, indeed, his multiculturalism now looks admirably prescient. So does his social conscience, which led him to publish “Poems on Slavery,” in 1842—a daring move at the time, and the object of a vicious review by Edgar Allan Poe. (The collection, Poe sneered, was “intended for the especial use of those negrophilic old ladies of the north, who form so large a part of Mr. LONGFELLOW’s friends.”) The poet also backed up his words with deeds, using some of his profits from “Hiawatha” to secretly buy slaves out of bondage. If any writer of his era is able to survive the obstacle course of cancel culture, it is likely to be Longfellow.

 

The ultimate litmus test, however, is the poetry. I snapped up the Library of America edition of “Poems and Other Writings” with a thrill of anticipation, fully hoping to encounter the Promethean figure of Basbanes’s biography. Reader, I tried. I thumbed through several hundred tissue-thin pages, added my wobbly midrash in mechanical pencil, chanted long passages aloud. I encountered the gems I have mentioned above, and many more. I was also won over by the sheer decency of the man, which seems somehow inextricable from his creations. As Oscar Wilde noted, perhaps with double-edged irony, “Longfellow was himself a beautiful poem, more beautiful than anything he ever wrote.”

 

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 was Robert Lowell who 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. He also had the bad luck of operating in the shadow of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the two mighty poles of American poetry, maximal and minimal, ego-drunk and ecstatic. Forgivably, he looks more than a little wan in their company.

 

And yet. “Hiawatha” will always give pleasure, its singsong acceleration like riding a bicycle downhill on a crisp autumn afternoon. The earworms, of which there are many, will keep echoing in our head, long after we’ve forgotten their original provenance. The poems of mourning, which made Longfellow into the nation’s grief counsellor, may even elicit what they did more than a century ago: tears.

 

This last point is worth dwelling on. After the turbulence of his early decades, the second half of Longfellow’s life can easily seem a sunlit vista of ease and accomplishment. The most celebrated poet of his day, he was also among the best paid—in 1874, the New York Ledger forked over four thousand dollars (the equivalent today of more than eighty thousand dollars) for a single poem, “The Hanging of the Crane.” He continued to function as the great conduit between world literature and the American public, translating “The Divine Comedy” and overseeing a thirty-one-volume behemoth, “Poems of Places,” conceived as “a kind of poetic guide-book” for its indefatigable readers. Not even fame managed to corrode his good nature. Year in and year out, Longfellow personally greeted the fans that flocked to his Cambridge dwelling, offering each one an autographed card from a stack he kept at hand.

 

Yet this phase of his life was also marked by catastrophic loss. In 1848, his baby daughter died after a short illness. (The Longfellows had three more daughters, and the poet commemorated them in “The Children’s Hour,” thereby introducing “the patter of little feet” into the sentimental lexicon.) More horrifically, his beloved Fanny perished in 1861, when her dress caught fire, most likely from a few drops of hot sealing wax falling onto the garment. Longfellow tried to quench the flames with a small rug, and then with his arms, but it was no use—she died the next morning. His hands and face were burned as well, and swollen for weeks. The psychic wounds were deeper still. Writing to his dear friend George William Curtis, he described himself as “utterly wretched and overwhelmed,—to the eyes of others, outwardly, calm; but inwardly bleeding to death.”

 

It was not in Longfellow’s nature to write about himself. He once described “I” as “that objectionable pronoun.” But he did produce a handful of lyrics throughout his career that seemed to spring directly from his own suffering. Several of these went on to become national touchstones. “Resignation,” about his daughter’s death, was published in 1849—and over the next few decades its key lines turned up on children’s tombstones throughout the United States. Then there is “The Cross of Snow,” an elegiac sonnet that Basbanes thought so crucial to understanding Longfellow that he chose it as his title.

 

Longfellow finished the poem on the eighteenth anniversary of Fanny’s death, slipped it into an envelope, and deposited it in the vast drift of his papers. In this sense, it is a private utterance. It is not, of course, a raw confessional, and the first half consists of a fairly straightforward treatment of Fanny’s portrait on the wall. But then, without any reader-friendly transition, Longfellow cuts to something more mysterious:

There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Basbanes suggests that the image is derived from a very specific source, the painter Thomas Moran’s “The Mountain of the Holy Cross” (1875), which depicts an alpine oddity: cruciform trenches on the flank of a Colorado peak, whose depth and placement keep the snow within them from melting. Longfellow was doubtless drawn to the cross as an emblem of Christian suffering. But what sticks in the mind, and stirs the heart, are those “sun-defying” depths, where we are too numb to feel our pain, or to control it. As a poet, Longfellow would visit these depths only infrequently. It’s a pity. They brought out something extraordinary in him: muted songs of lamentation, more moving for having been delivered sotto voce, the sadness bleeding through the satin finish. ♦

 

 

Published in the print edition of the June 8 & 15, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Public Poet.”

James Marcus is a writer, an editor, and a translator. He is at work on his second book, “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Emerson in Thirteen Installments.”