3.6 Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), a contemporary of Whitman, though “certainly more universally loved”, even though he did not possess “so colorful a personality” (ALLEN, 1955, p.541), wrote some of the most popular poems in American literature, in which he created a body of romantic American legends. Although a sympathetic and ethical person, Longfellow was not involved in religious and social issues of the time.[1] However, he did display some interest in the abolitionist cause. He achieved great fame with poems such as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). He used uncommon, old rhythms to weave myths of the American past. Nevertheless, Longfellow was “predominantly an iambic writer”, who included in his poetry variations of this poetic pattern, such as “elisions, the trochaic substitutions, the spondaic effects”, but all within the “regular iambic patterns” (WRIGHT, 1985, p.90).
The main problem, then, is that Longfellow did not penetrate the spirit of America. His mastery of poetry was “of a kind which [forced] him to turn away from the living world and to sing either of Europe or of the American past” (1985, p.90). A quotation[2] from “Death of Longfellow” (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.941-3) shall provide us with more specific information on the subject:
Camden, April 3, ’82.— […] Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to me not only to be eminent in the style and forms of poetical expression that mark the present age, (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness, of verbal melody,) but to bring what is always dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of things. He is certainly the sort of bard and counteractant most needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon races, and especially for the present age in America—an age tyrannically regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politician and the day workman—for whom and among whom he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference—poet of the mellow twilight of the past in Italy, Germany, Spain, and in Northern Europe—poet of all sympathetic gentleness—and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were ask’d to name the man who has done more, and in more valuable directions, for America.
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