Existing comment:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882:
As a poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has suffered the fate of many popular writers: a voice of its time frequently lacks staying power. Thus this mild romantic whose life in Cambridge was placidly comfortable has been eclipsed by his "darker" contemporaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The jogging rhythms of "The Song of Hiawatha," "Paul Revere's Ride," and other Longfellow ballads are quaint artifacts of bygone New England. Longfellow frequently overstates his poems' moral points, perhaps because he sensed the pragmatic Americans wanted art they could use for self-improvement. Nonetheless, he was the country's first professional poet because he had the literary knowledge and craftsmanship necessary to write verse about America that was comparable in quality to that of his English contemporaries.
Thomas Buchanan Read, 1869 |