HENRY WADSWORTH
LONGFELLOW
(1807-1882)
List of Longfellow's Works
 Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
(Epic Poem) (1847)
The Song of Hiawatha (Epic
Poem) (1855)
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives,
and Personal Issues
 Longfellow's themes in the poems in this collection
are nearly indistinguishable from those of his
contemporaries in England. It's useful to show him,
therefore, as an example of the branch of American
literature that created itself in admiring imitation of
English literature. He is also that rare thing, a
genuine celebrity of a poet, whose fame has
subsided and whose stature has shrunk accordingly.
Many of the poems we now admire most are from his
later years, and conform better to modern taste than
the poems for which he was famous in his lifetime.
Thus, he can be used as a good example of the ways
in which changing literary tastes alter literary
reputations.
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic
Conventions
 Longfellow's poems are not only accessible in their
meaning, but they are also highly regular in their form.
It is very simple to teach metrics with Longfellow
because he provides easy and memorable examples
of so many metrical schemes. These can be
presented in connection with Longfellow's personal
history, for he is of course an academic poet, and as
such a poet writing often self-consciously from a
learned perspective. Thus, nothing with him seems
wholly spontaneous or accidental.
“The Song of Hiawatha” Critical
Analysis
 While The Song of Hiawatha was roundly
praised on both sides of the Atlantic after its
publication, criticism in more recent years has
been considerably less laudatory.
Longfellow's choice to mimic the solemn,
unrhymed tetrameter of the Finns’ Kalevala
has caused his poem to be criticized by many,
to the extent that some have felt Longfellow
plagiarized the Finnish work.
 While the poem was sometimes mocked by
his contemporaries, it has been subjected to
increasing satire through the years, even
being lampooned in Marx Brothers films and
Bugs Bunny cartoons. Critics have also
debated what sources Longfellow used, and
some have been annoyed by the
anachronism of the arrival of white men when
Hiawatha's stories are more properly set long
before the European settlers arrived.
 Nevertheless Longfellow’s poem was popular
with the public. Despite the flaws critics have
highlighted in the work, The Song of
Hiawatha is still widely accepted as a
significant nineteenth-century American poem.
“A Psalm of Life” Critical Analysis
 Longfellow once said that if a poet “wishes the world
to listen and be edified, he will do well to choose a
language that is generally understood.” Early critics
of “A Psalm of Life” appreciated what they saw as the
simple beauty of Longfellow’s language. One early
reviewer wrote in The North American Review in
1840 that Longfellow’s poems “are filled with solemn
pathos, uttered in the most melodious and
picturesque language.... [How] rare is it to find poetry
to compare with [‘A Psalm of Life’].”
 Another critic, writing in The Christian Examiner,
stated that “A Psalm of Life” “is equally admirable for
its simplicity, manly fervor, dignity, and truth.” But not
all of Longfellow’s contemporaries valued his high
moral tone and his didacticism — his obvious efforts
to teach moral truths. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance,
writing in Graham’s Magazine, condemned
Longfellow for making “didacticism ... the prevalent
tone of his song.” Poe’s complaint was not with
Longfellow’s moral lesson, as such, but with
Longfellow’s method of driving home that lesson: “We
do not mean to say that a didactic moral may not be
well made the undercurrent of a poetical thesis, but
that it can never be well put so obtrusively ....”
 Twentieth-century critics have tended to agree with
Poe’s assessment that “A Psalm of Life” is overly
didactic. Indeed, the word “didactic” surfaces
repeatedly in twentieth-century criticism of the poem.
Howard Mumford Jones, in an essay titled
“Longfellow,” characterized “A Psalm of Life” as an
“obvious and awful didactic piece,” though he did
appreciate the poem’s “admirable” fourth stanza. And
another critic, Alfred Kreymborg, in Our Singing
Strengths: An Outline of American Poetry, caustically
described “A Psalm of Life” as “nine jingling verses,
dripping with a larger number of clichés than any
other poem in the language.”
 Perhaps because of the poem’s obvious moral tone, by the
middle of the twentieth century, critics had largely stopped
writing about it. Still, in 1993, Dana Gioia, writing in The
Columbia History of American Poetry, noted the longevity or
continuing fame of “A Psalm of Life”: “This menacingly upbeat
poem refuses to die.” Gioia argues that “A Psalm of Life” has
remained in favor with popular (as opposed to scholarly)
audiences precisely because of its obvious moral lessons. Gioia
suggests, moreover, that the very clichés that Kreymborg so
disliked are exactly what draw readers to the poem. While
preachy clichés or proverbs might not make for good poetry,
Gioia reasons, they have tremendous popular appeal: “‘A Psalm
of Life’ fails as lyric poetry,” Gioia states, “because it belongs to
a different genre, inspirational didactic verse.”