sees, like so many Americans of his time, English
literature as the only model available for Ameri-
can writers. Although ‘‘The Literary Spirit of
Our Country’’ and ‘‘Our Native Writers’’ only
mark his starting point, the impersonal, carefully
crafted, and made-to-fill-the-cultural-need char-
acter of his verse remained the hallmark of Long-
fellow’s most popular works. And from the very
beginning, he sees the development of American
literature as proceeding along the patterns estab-
lished by older cultures: ‘‘Every rock shall become
a chronicle of storied allusions: and the tomb of
the Indian prophet be as hallowed as the sepulch-
ers of ancient kings, or the damp vault and per-
petual lamp of the Saracen monarch’’ (Ruland
238). To help him achieve the goal, he had, beside
literary erudition, ‘‘a strain of the genuine folk
poet in his make-up,’’ and some of his poems
‘‘were written with as little effort as a folksinger
puts into a new ballad on an old and familiar kind
of subject’’ (Arvin 69). Throughout his life, too,
he patiently accepted his iconic role as national
poet, even when its rituals became quite irksome
so that practically all Longfellow’s biographers
relate anecdotes of his civility to unexpected vis-
itors and his patience with countless requests for
autographs....
Longfellow wrote his defense of poetry in
1832, having returned from Europe where he
prepared himself for the professorship of mod-
ern languages at his alma mater. In Europe
and while teaching at Bowdoin, he practically
stopped writing original poetry, submitting his
talent to the regime of ‘‘schooling himself’’ in
Romance and German literatures and then to
the quite severe regime of teaching. Critics
often regret those years as wasted since at the
age most prolific for many romantic poets, he let
his talent lie buried. Yet faced, after his experi-
ence of European cultural wealth, with the
dearth of cultural resources at Bowdoin, the
young professor must have felt that cultivation,
in which he always believed, became his urgent
basic job. He taught himself and he taught his
students, expending an astonishing amount of
energy in the effort. And, as Dana Gioia notices
in his fine essay inThe Columbia History of
American Poetry, Longfellow’s training pro-
gram resembled Ezra Pound’s though Pound
did not do much teaching. Like Pound, Long-
fellow trained his pen by writing prose; and like
Pound, he lectured on Romance literatures.
Confronted with a similar challenge to create
American poetry for their respective times,
American poetry that would unapologetically
claim its place among and even rival contempo-
rary European achievements, both poets began
with an intensive program of schooling them-
selves for the task through extensive translation
work. Both, too, tended to confront their own
situation via identification with the authors
translated. Pound, however, practically gave up
both the hope and the work of educating the
American reading public. Longfellow made
that task the work of his life.
In 1837, reviewingTwice Told Tales, Long-
fellow, already Professor of Modern Languages
at Harvard and a successful author ofOutre-Mer,
praised his Bowdoin classmate’s book for dem-
onstrating that native history provided ample
material for native imagination, and then he
focused on the accessibility of Nathaniel Haw-
thorne’s style:
Some writers of the present day have intro-
duced a kind of Gothic architecture into their
style. All is fantastic, vast, and wondrous in the
outward form. And within is mysterious twi-
light, and the swelling sound of an organ, and a
voice chanting hymns in Latin, which need a
translation for many of the crowd. To this I do
not object. Let the priest chant in what lan-
guage he will, so long as he understands his
own Mass-book. But if he wishes the world to
listen and be edified, he will do well to choose a
language that is generally understood. (Prose
366–67)
From the beginning of his career there were
thus two sides to Longfellow’s poetic identity. His
erudition and scholarship made him admire excel-
lence regardless of nationality; he also aspired and
belonged to the international literary elite of his
times and admired Goethe; and he became a
friend of Charles Dickens and Ferdinand Freili-
grath. He felt at home in the multilingual Euro-
pean literary tradition, but he was also deeply
rooted in the American soil, never considered
expatriation, and attentively listened to the Amer-
ican ‘‘popular mind’’ since he was eager for the
American people ‘‘to listen and be edified.’’...
Source:Agnieszka Salska, ‘‘From National to Suprana-
tional Conception of Literature: The Case of Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow,’’ inAmerican Transcendental
Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2006, pp. 611–28.Donald A. Sears
In the following essay, Sears examines the roots of
Longfellow’s ballads, including ‘‘The Wreck of the
Hesperus.’’The Wreck of the Hesperus