Longfellow

Longfellow

American poet and educator, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, Maine on February 27, 1807. During his lifetime, Longfellow enjoyed a popularity that few poets have ever known. He was very successful in responding to the need felt by Americans at the time for a literature of their own, a retelling in verse of the stories and legends of the United States, especially New England. His three most popular narrative poems are thoroughly rooted in American soil. "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), an American idyll; "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the first genuinely native epic in American poetry; and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858), a Puritan romance of Longfellow's own ancestors, John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. Longfellow also wrote the intensely national "Paul Revere's Ride," the best known poem of Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). A professor of modern literature at Harvard College, Longfellow did much to educate the general reading public in the literatures of Europe by means of his many anthologies and translations, the most important of which was his masterful rendition in English of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-67). He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts on March 24, 1882.