and acquired cultural polish. So he learned French and German and Italian and in time became
the most learned (so far) of American literary men, translating Dante, difficult Provencal poets,
and German philosophy. He taught not just at Bowdoin but later at Harvard for eighteen years
where, thanks to a rich second wife, daughter of a successful cotton-mill owner, he made Craigie
House-the mansion his father-in-law provided on their wedding-a center of Cambridge
intellectual society.
Longfellow's poems flowed from his pen in steady and stately succession, and his unique gift
for resonant lines allowed him to enter into the minds and hearts, and stay in the memories, of
the middle class on both sides of the Atlantic. None of his lyric contemporaries, not even
Tennyson and Browning, found himself quoted so often: I shot an arrow in the air;'Life is real /
Life is earnest;' Footprints in the sands of time;'A banner with a strange device;' The midnight ride of Paul Revere;'A Lady with a Lamp;' Ships that pass in the night;'Under a spreading
chestnut tree;' It was the schooner Hesperus;'When she was good, she was very, very good;'
Fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away;'Something attempted, something done'-
these golden phrases, and the thought behind them, passed into the language. It was Longfellow
who attempted, with some success at the time, less since, to write America's first epic poem, The
Song of Hiawatha (1855), in which he used the Finnish metrics of Kalavala to produce the
American equivalent of Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Even more ambitious, in a way, was his
successful attempt to sum up America's powerful (almost strident) message to the world in one
short poem, `The Building of the Ship:'
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Longfellow was no stranger to personal tragedy: he lost his first wife when she was still a
young bride; his second, loved still more, was burned to death in 1861, and the poet was stricken
and silent for a decade. He had many friends, had a sweet, decorous, and benign disposition, and
lived a sheltered life in the comfort and safety of university New England. There were no sexual
hang-ups in his life, no mysteries, no hidden, smoldering pits to be explored. So he has been
largely ignored by 20th-century literary academics. But he was much loved in his day, by
ordinary people in clapboard houses and Western cabins, as well as by the Boston literati. When
his great poem in unrhymed English hexameters, The Courtship of Miles Standish, was published
simultaneously (1858) in Boston and London, 15,000 copies were sold on the first day. The
English treated him as a member of their grand poetical canon, awarding him degrees at Oxford
and Cambridge, and he took tea with Queen Victoria, a privilege hitherto accorded to Tennyson
alone. On his death he became the first American to have his niche in Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey. More important, perhaps, he played a notable role in making Americans
familiar with Europe's poetical heritage-he was a transatlantic bridge in himself.
One of the few people who went for Longfellow in his day, in a notorious article called
'Longfellow and Other Plagiarists,' was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who stood right at the other
end of the worthiness and acceptability scale. Poe was a natural misfit who crammed an
extraordinary quantity of misfortune into his short forty years of life. He was both a throwback to
the Gothick Romanticism of the years 1790-1820 and an adumbrator of the Symbolism to come.
He was born near Boston, the offspring of strolling players. He had a difficult, orphan childhood