Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In his last year at Bowdoin, Longfellow wrote to his father that his whole soul burned after eminence in literature. The family had the standing to indulge it — his grandfather had helped found the college and his father sat on its board. He had enrolled at 15, met Nathaniel Hawthorne there, published nearly 40 poems in newspapers before commencement, and finished fourth in his class. Bowdoin offered him a professorship of modern languages, so he sailed for Europe in May 1826 to go and acquire some. Three years abroad cost his father 2,604 dollars and produced French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German, most of it learned without a teacher. He came home a linguist who meant to be a poet.

He taught modern languages at Harvard for 18 years and quit in 1854 to write full time. The output was built to be read aloud: Voices of the Night in 1839, Evangeline in 1847, The Song of Hiawatha in 1855, The Courtship of Miles Standish in 1858, and a three-volume Dante that made him the first American to carry the whole Divine Comedy into English. The market answered. His writing brought 219 dollars in 1840 and more than 48,000 in 1868, and in 1874 he sold one poem for 3,000, the highest price yet paid for a poem.

His first wife, Mary Potter, miscarried in Europe in October 1835 and died weeks later at 22. He had her embalmed and shipped home in a lead coffin. The second loss he could not manage. On July 9, 1861, Frances Appleton was sealing envelopes of the children's hair when her dress caught fire — the sourced accounts disagree on how — and Longfellow, waking from a nap, smothered the flames with his body. She died the next morning. His burns kept him from her funeral, and the damage to his face ended his shaving: the white beard in every schoolroom portrait is a burn scar. He took laudanum and ether for the grief and begged not to be sent to an asylum. His sonnet for her, The Cross of Snow, came 18 years later and went unpublished in his lifetime.

His 70th birthday in 1877 drew parades and public readings, and in 1884 he became the first non-British writer given a bust in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, where he is still the only American poet. Then the academy dropped him. Lewis Mumford wrote that Longfellow could be cut from literary history without much effect, and the poet Lewis Putnam Turco called him minor and derivative in every way. Nicholas Basbanes, in 2020, called that demotion an orchestrated dismissal unique in American letters. One thing never slipped. Paul Revere's Ride, published as South Carolina seceded, is knowingly bad history — and it is the version the country still holds. BriefHistory has the ride as it happened.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Voices of the Night book
  His first book of poetry — mostly translations, with nine original poems 1839
• Ballads and Other Poems book
  Carried The Village Blacksmith and The Wreck of the Hesperus 1841
• Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie book
  Book-length poem in hexameter, published November 1, 1847 1847
• The Song of Hiawatha book
  Trochaic meter drawn from the Finnish Kalevala, sources from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft 1855
• Paul Revere's Ride article
  The January 1861 Atlantic Monthly, on sale December 20, 1860 1861
• The Divine Comedy, translated book
  Three volumes — the first complete American translation of Dante 1867

• November 17, 1820 aged 13 Publishes his first poem at 13 in the Portland Gazette Four stanzas called The Battle of Lovell's Pond.
• August 27, 1829 aged 22 Turns down the Bowdoin professorship over the money He called 600 dollars disproportionate to the duties. The trustees offered 800, plus 100 to serve as librarian, a post requiring one hour a day.
• November 29, 1835 aged 28 His wife Mary Potter dies at 22 while they are abroad A miscarriage in October, six months into the pregnancy, and several weeks of illness after it.
• May 10, 1843 aged 36 Fanny Appleton writes that she will marry him She had refused him for years. He was too restless to take a carriage and walked 90 minutes to her house on Beacon Hill.
• November 1, 1847 aged 40 Publishes Evangeline
• 1855 aged ~48 The Song of Hiawatha appears, and so do the plagiarism charges Critics said he had lifted the meter and incidents from the Finnish Kalevala. Scholars have since faulted the ethnography he took from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
• December 20, 1860 aged 53 Paul Revere's Ride reaches readers on the day South Carolina secedes He had researched the night and changed it. Revere did not receive the lantern signal, he ordered it, he was rowed across the Charles by other men, and he never reached Concord. William Dawes and Samuel Prescott are not in the poem at all.
• July 10, 1861 aged 54 Frances dies of her burns and his own injuries keep him from the funeral Her dress had caught fire the previous day. He beat out the flames with his body and stopped shaving afterward.
• March 24, 1882 aged 75 Dies of peritonitis at the Cambridge house, surrounded by family He had endured several days of severe stomach pain on opium.

• Paul Revere 1735–1818
  Silversmith and engraver whose Boston Massacre print and 1775 ride carried Revolutionary messaging. made famous
• Charles Sumner 1811–1874
  Massachusetts senator and abolitionist leader who pressed for Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation. closest friend
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. college friend
• Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849
  Master of macabre fiction and poetry who invented the detective story and influenced horror worldwide. attacked by
• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. dismissed by
• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. eulogized by