how many languages did henry wadsworth longfellow speak

Date February 1, 2007. Among the shorter poems of his late career, Longfellows sonnets are especially prized. [74] Longfellow was awakened from his nap and rushed to help her, throwing a rug over her, but it was too small. When he died of phlebitis less than a month after his 75th birthday and only a few days after completing The Bells of San Blas, Longfellow left an estate worth 356,320 dollars to his children and grandchildren, with weekly book sales amounting to 1,000 copies. I'm gwine." Richard Henry Stoddard summed up Longfellows contribution in an 1881 essay, pointing out how Longfellow remained true to himself and to his scholarly impulses by creating and satisfying a taste for a literature which did not exist in this country until he began to write. In so doing, Longfellow had not only disseminated European stories, sensibilities, and versification but also enlarged our sympathies until they embrace other peoples than ours. Two decades later, Thomas Wentworth Higginson saluted his former professors contribution to American literature in enriching and refining it and giving it a cosmopolitan culture, and an unquestioned standing in the literary courts of the civilized world. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). 'I Would I Were a Careless Child' 6. The marriage was an exceptionally happy one for both partners and brought Longfellow the domestic stability he had missed. He achieved a level of national and international prominence previously unequaled in the literary history of the United States and is one of the few American writers. He once attended a ball without her and noted, "The lights seemed dimmer, the music sadder, the flowers fewer, and the women less fair. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and "Evangeline". Some years after Longfellows death a violent reaction set in against his verse as critics dismissed his conventional high-minded sentiments and the gentle strain of Romanticism that he had made so popular. Longfellows long poem The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) was another great popular success. These virtues made him sovereign of more hearts than any other poet of his generation. James Russell Lowell also traced Longfellows honored status to personal virtues in demanding of the irascibly jealous Poe, Does it make a man worse that his characters such / As to make his friends love him (as you think) too much? It comes not back again. Even if time has proved him something less than the master poet he never claimed to be, Longfellow made pioneering contributions to American literary life by exemplifying the possibility of a successful authorial career, by linking American poetry to European traditions beyond England, and by developing a surprisingly wide readership for Romantic poetry. [16] In his senior year, Longfellow wrote to his father about his aspirations: I will not disguise it in the leastthe fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently after it, and every earthly thought centres in itI am almost confident in believing, that if I can ever rise in the world it must be by the exercise of my talents in the wide field of literature. In 1829 he returned to the United States to be a professor and librarian at Bowdoin. Most of us only get one life. Some of Longfellows sonnets and other lyrics are still among the finest in American poetry, and Hiawatha, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Evangeline, and Paul Reveres Ride have become inseparable parts of the American heritage. While coping with private tragedy at home, he suffered the additional trauma of the Civil War. UNIVE'RSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY, CAMBRIDGE. [4] He was named after his mother's brother Henry Wadsworth, a Navy lieutenant who had died three years earlier at the Battle of Tripoli. Now he plunged into work, translating at the rate of a canto a day. [62] His love for Fanny is evident in the following lines from his only love poem, the sonnet "The Evening Star"[63] which he wrote in October 1845: "O my beloved, my sweet Hesperus! Other than being a poet of great repute; Longfellow was also an educationist, who was a professor at his alma mater Bowdoin College and latter at the Harvard College. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882) was America's most beloved nineteenth-century poet, . English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. The world, he concluded with characteristic serenity, belongs to those who come the last, / They will find hope and strength as we have done.. Hyatt Waggoner observed the irony of Longfellows having been most appreciated in his own time for A Psalm of Life, noting that though it intends to mean that life is worth living after all, what it effectively does mean is that life must be worth living but the poet cant think why. [70], Frances was putting locks of her children's hair into an envelope on July 9, 1861[71] and attempting to seal it with hot sealing wax while Longfellow took a nap. [28] While in Spain, Longfellow was saddened to learn that his favorite sister Elizabeth had died of tuberculosis at the age of 20 that May. [118] Scholar Bliss Perry suggests that criticizing Longfellow at that time was almost a criminal act equal to "carrying a rifle into a national park". [148], "Henry Wadsworth" redirects here. Longfellow saw the . The Tales of a Wayside Inn, modeled roughly on Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales and published in 1863, reveals his narrative gift. The framework Longfellow provided, however, allowed his six storytellers (the Landlord, the Student, the Spanish Jew, the Italian, the Musician, and the Theologian) to criticize each others presentations and draw out lessons of tolerance, forgiveness, and faith. This harsh critical assessment, which tried to reduce him to the status of a mere hearthside rhymer, was perhaps as unbalanced as the adulation he had received during his lifetime. To prepare himself for the new opportunity, Longfellow undertook another period of European travelthis time accompanied by his wife and two of her friends. His 1868-1869 final visit to Europe, on which he was attended by a large family party, turned into a triumphal progression framed by honorary degrees awarded by Cambridge and Oxford universities. Longfellows most ambitious effort in prose, Hyperion blended the sketchbook attributes of Outre-Mer with elements of the Romance as Longfellow developed the fictional persona of Paul Flemming to act out his lingering grief for Mary, rejected love for Fanny, and poetical aspirations spurred by German authors. [142] In reality, his life was much more difficult than was assumed. - The witches speak in trochaic tetrameter; incomplete, unsettling, incantatory method of speaking. Family tree of Henry WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. [61] They were soon married; Nathan Appleton bought the Craigie House as a wedding present, and Longfellow lived there for the rest of his life. [5] He was the second of eight children. Longfellows imitativeness differed significantly from that of many contemporaries, however, in that he early outgrew his tendency to echo Bryants style or that of English Romantic poets and turned instead to German Romanticism, which he virtually introduced into American poetry, and to traditions of European verse from many countries and eras. [83] In 1874, Samuel Ward helped him sell the poem "The Hanging of the Crane" to the New York Ledger for $3,000; it was the highest price ever paid for a poem. Both seaside and fireside come together in The Fire of Drift-Wood, a mood piece employing imagery of light and warmth drawn from shipwreck as a metaphor for intuited estrangement among friends. Though its account of Reveres ride is historically inaccurate, the poem created an American legend. "[139] Author Nicholas A. Basbanes, in his 2020 book Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, defended Longfellow as "the victim of an orchestrated dismissal that may well be unique in American literary history". Back at Bowdoin in his new role, Longfellow felt stultified in a college atmosphere so different from what he had experienced at Gttingen and stifled by the provincial atmosphere of Brunswick. In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcrafts two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). The schoolchildren of Cambridge, Massachusetts presented him in 1879 with a chair carved from the wood of the spreading chestnut-tree immortalized in The Village Blacksmith. His picture appeared among Our American Poets in classrooms across the United States, thanks to Fieldss success in placing Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in textbooks that established canonical readings for many decades. [27] Irving encouraged the young Longfellow to pursue writing. Children across New England are familiar with the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose "Paul Revere's Ride" has been recited at many a grade school pageant. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. His model was Washington Irving, to whom he was introduced while in Spain, and Longfellow envisaged putting his experience to Irvingesque literary use. The Day Is Done (1844) speaks to the comforting quiet offered the weary reader by some humbler poet than the Miltonic and Dantean mastersa poet such as Longfellow found himself becoming by virtue of the kindly, sympathetic tone that characterized his popular poems. Similar to an epic, a narrative poem tells a story. Longfellow died in 1882. Although the sonnet Mezzo Cammin, written toward the end of that stay in Germany, laments how Half of my life is gone, and I have let / The years slip from me and have not fulfilled / The aspiration of my youth, to build / Some tower of song, he was entering into a vigorously productive period of his career. [39] In October 1835, his wife Mary had a miscarriage during the trip, about six months into her pregnancy. [58] A critic for The Dial agreed, calling it "the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow's thin books; spirited and polished like its forerunners; but the topic would warrant a deeper tone". . Cookouts, fireworks, and history lessons recounted in poems, articles, and audio. [124] His accusations may have been a publicity stunt to boost readership of the Broadway Journal, for which he was the editor at the time. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying. He moved ahead to new dramatic poems, notably Judas Maccabeus in Three Books of Song (1872) and The Masque of Pandora (1875); Michael Angelo, his last major poem, appeared posthumously in 1883 in its unfinished condition. Died on March 24, 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. In Germany, Longfellow formed a close friendship with the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, and in England he deepened an earlier acquaintance with Charles Dickens. Early on young Henry knew he wanted to be a poet . Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. Longfellows metric choice, which captures the beat of a tom-tom, exposed the poem to parody, as did its insistent repetitions and use of Native American words. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and . [41] He was deeply saddened by her death and wrote: "One thought occupies me night and dayShe is dead She is dead! The recent graduate was asked to become the first professor, with the understanding that he should be given a period of time in which to travel and study in Europe. Learn. I have aimed higher than this". Other poems had local settingsfor example, The Bridge, which contrasted Longfellows newfound personal peace with the melancholy of his earlier years in a reflection on the bridge over the Charles River near his home. He was so fluent in translating that on graduation he was offered a professorship in modern languages provided that he would first study in Europe. Soon afterward, however, he returned to the most American of topics in The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and to the interest in American indigenous peoples he had earlier shown at Bowdoin and in To the Driving Cloud (1845). [132] A more modern critic said, "Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow? [137] In the 20th century, literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted: "Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow's popular rhymings. Longfellow returned to this theme three years later in his last major prose composition, Kavanagh, A Tale (1849). [56] Amidst this, he fell into "periods of neurotic depression with moments of panic" and took a six-month leave of absence from Harvard to attend a health spa in the former Marienberg Benedictine Convent at Boppard in Germany. Longfellow and Mary Potter were married in September 1831. In his years there, he earned a reputation as being very studious and became fluent in Latin. The book spread like wildfire in both the United States and the United Kingdom. [45] Elizabeth Craigie owned the home, the widow of Andrew Craigie, and she rented rooms on the second floor. His original works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then still part of . His life was much more difficult than was assumed their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology legend... His life was much more difficult than was assumed Standish ( 1858 ) was &! Exceptionally happy one for both partners and brought Longfellow the domestic stability he had missed Courtship of Standish... Both the United States and the United States and the United States to be a professor and librarian Bowdoin! 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