pilgrim-poet making his way from hell to para-
dise and in the process building the impressive
cathedral-like structure of the poem—becomes
Longfellow’s mentor and guide in his time of
need, just as Virgil is Dante’s guide in Hell. The
Italian poem functions as a kind of objective
correlative for an experience too difficult and
too private for its New England translator to
treat directly; the tight sonnet form provides
discipline and harnesses emotion. Longfellow’s
cycle belongs, in my opinion, to the best sonnets
in the English language precisely because their
formal polish brings into vivid relief the intensity
of the underlying struggle to raise an intricately
ordered language structure over the foundation
of wordless pain. However, I also readDivina
Commediaas a programmatic statement that con-
tinues the poet’s life-long reflection on poetry and
its function and on the poet’s relation to com-
munity and to literary tradition.
Longfellow was barely eighteen when he
joined the national debate on the prospects of
developing in the United States a literature com-
mensurate with the political and geographical
distinctiveness of the country. As demonstrated
by Robert E. Spiller and Benjamin T. Spencer,
exhortations and controversies of the campaign
for national literature engaged the best Ameri-
can minds since before the country won political
independence. On the verge of his graduation,
the brilliant Bowdoin student, who already pub-
lished regularly in the United States Literary
Gazette, spoke his mind in the magazine’s ‘‘Lay
Monastery’’ column. Assuming, as so many of
his contemporaries did, the primacy of nature as
the chief resource of national imagination, the
young author made the following reservation:
But if the natural scenery of our country, where
nature exhibits such various beauty and sub-
limity, can give strength and vigor to intellect,
and with them unite poetic feeling, the lapse of
another century will give us those rich associa-
tions, which it is said are now wanting, and will
make America in some degree a classical land.
(‘‘Literary Spirit’’ 27)
He also pointed out ‘‘the want of exclusive
cultivation, which so noble a branch of literature
(i.e. poetry) would seem to require’’ and sug-
gested that the defect could be remedied by
‘‘the honorable hand of patronage alone’’ (27).
Yet, the somewhat aristocratic tying of national
creativity to prior cultivation of both nature and
society is practically negated earlier in the essay,
when the author thinks the writer most sure of
his contributing to ‘‘revolutions in letters,’’ how-
ever slow in coming they may be, not when
‘‘influenced by individual caprice,’’ but when
moving ‘‘with the motion of the popular mind.’’
On the one hand, young Longfellow has a clear
sense of the need for a cultivated elite as asine
qua nonof both artistic patronage and creativity:
‘‘Whilst there are but few great minds wholly
devoted to letters, the exertions of genius will
be far more conspicuous and effectual, than
when a larger multitude has gathered around
our literary altars’’ (25). On the other hand,
‘‘the motion of the popular mind’’ is held to be
the poet’s surest guide. The latter assumption
sounds even more democratic than Whitman’s
claim to be able to lead his audience to wisdom
and knowledge more effectively than they can
travel by themselves.
At the start of his career we thus see Long-
fellow balancing between his consciousness of
the poet’s intellectual exclusiveness and the spe-
cial status of his vocation on the one hand and,
on the other, a radically democratic, even popu-
list view of the writer as someone who does not
lead nor even represents but follows ‘‘the popu-
lar mind.’’ The two concepts have a common base
in the conviction that poetic creativity is culturally
rather than personally determined. Poems are
products of the artists’ elite intellectual status
offered out of their elitist sense of obligation to
respond to the needs of ‘‘the popular mind.’’ Con-
sequently, as Matthew Gartner observes, ‘‘Long-
fellow mastered the art of encoding a patrician
subtext within populist poetry’’ (72), and his ‘‘suc-
cess with many different strata of American soci-
ety was intimately connected to the complex ways
in which he managed to inhabit his own work as a
public figure who represented both the elites and
the masses’’ (62).
‘‘Our Native Writers,’’his graduation address,
condenses the argument of the earlier essay to a
plea for social recognition and remuneration of
the man of letters and, on the positive side, to the
affirmation of faith in the future of American
literature shaped by and emerging from Ameri-
can writers’ intimacy with American land and
democratic institutions. The reservation about
the necessity of cultivation before achievement,
however, remains valid. Both texts are really juve-
nilia and cannot serve as a fair measure of Long-
fellow’s mature conception of poetry or the poet’s
vocation. For example, in contrast with Professor
Longfellow, Longfellow as a student at BowdoinTheWreckoftheHesperus