Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807–1882
Biography
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, in what was then the District of Maine within Massachusetts. He studied at Bowdoin College, taught modern languages there, and later took a professorship at Harvard. In 1854 he gave up teaching to devote himself to writing, and he lived for the rest of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a house that had once served as George Washington's headquarters. He died there in 1882.
He became one of the most widely read poets of the nineteenth century and is usually counted among the Fireside Poets of New England, whose verse was written for the family circle. Much of his work turns on myth, legend and history, and his poems found readers in Britain and Europe as well as at home. He published Evangeline in 1847, a long poem about Acadian families driven from Nova Scotia in 1755, and The Song of Hiawatha in 1855, which draws on Ojibwe legends recorded by the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. He also produced a complete English version of Dante's Divine Comedy.
The two books on this site are Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie and The Song of Hiawatha, the long narrative poems for which he is most often remembered. Read together, they show his range, from a tragic romance set against an expulsion to a poem built on Native American legend. After his death his reputation fell, and critics faulted his verse for sentiment and for borrowing too freely from European models, but both poems are still widely read and taught.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
On the eve of their wedding, Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse are parted when the British deport the Acadian farmers of Grand-Pré in 1755. She spends her life searching for him across America, and finds him only when he is dying. This book uses the racial and…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The Song of Hiawatha
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Longfellow's long poem tells the life of Hiawatha, the Ojibwe hero, from his boyhood among the animals through his fasting, his fishing and the wedding feast to the coming of the white man, and does so in unrhymed trochees borrowed from the Kalevala. It was one of the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.