Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Accomplishments

“He comes as the poet of melancholy, courtesy, deference—poet of all sympathetic gentleness—and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were ask’d to name the man who has done more, and in more valuable directions, for America.” This quote from Walt Whitman perfectly embodies the writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an incredibly influential author. His classical Romantic structuring and rhyme schemes, combined with harrowing subjects in his poems, caused his writing to touch countless avid poetry lovers around the world. Longfellow was a great American Fireside Poet during the Romantic literary era, who beautifully composed one of his most famous poems, Footsteps of Angels, after the death of his wife.
The grievous life of this gallant American author began on February 27th, 1807, in Portland, Maine (a city which, at that time, was still a part of Massachusetts).
He was the second of eight children born to Stephen Longfellow, a prominent lawyer and member of Congress, and Zilpah Wadsworth, the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero (Beck). As a child, Longfellow had a vivid imagination. The sailors he often heard speaking Spanish, French, and German on the port-side streets sparked a love for reading stories set in foreign, far-away places, like 1000 Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and the works of Shakespeare. He studied in Europe for three years after college, and then returned to his alma mater--the renowned liberal arts school in Maine, Bowdoin College--to teach modern languages. In fact, he was such a noted translator and scholar in so many languages, he was the first American poet to be honored with a bust in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner (“A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets”). His first book, a description of his travels, was written in 1831 and aptly named Outre Mar (“Overseas”). In that same year, Longfellow married his first wife, Mary Storer Potter of Portland. However, their happiness was short-lived; during a second trip to
Europe in November of 1835, Longfellow received word that his wife had passed during a tragic miscarriage. He stayed in Europe for an additional year, working through his grief and writing sorrow-filled works to be published years later--including “Footsteps of Angels” (Beck). When he finally returned home in 1836, he accepted a teaching position at Harvard. It was there that he began to work on his first few collections of poems; Voices of the Night, published in 1839, followed by Ballads and Poems in 1841. These poems were the ones that began culminating his popularity, mainly because they all had a common theme of overcoming adversity, and were riddled with a tone that gave off that “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” American attitude. In the spring following this last publication, Longfellow remarried to a young woman from Boston, Frances Appleton. The following years were the happiest of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s life; in 1854, he quit teaching to devote all of his time to his poetry and his family (He and Frances had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood). He found himself most successful in his literary work during this time. However, just a few short months after the Civil War began in 1861, Frances was sealing an envelope when her dress caught on fire, and despite her husband’s desperate attempts to save her, she died on the following day. Longfellow didn’t write a single poem for the following two years. He did, though, produce seven more books of poetry between 1866 and his death in March of 1882. It’s evident, though, that Longfellow did not die without leaving his mark on this world. He produced the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy; his works were published by 24 different companies in London alone; he held many admirers in his time, including Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, and Charles Baudelaire; and his seventy-fifth birthday, in the year of his death, was celebrated nation-wide. It is clear that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not only a prodigious author, but the American hero of eloquence.
That poetic fervor of Longfellow’s was widely common among poets of his time, as he wrote during the Romantic literary era (“Literary Periods and History Timeline.”).
In fact, he sat alongside many other well-known poets as a member of the group of Romantic authors known as the Fireside Poets, including John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant (“A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets”). Authors from this select group tended to boycott any experimentation in their pieces, and instead opted for more traditional forms of poetry; because of this, their poems favor towards strict rhyme scheme and metric cadences (“A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets”). They frequently found subjects to write about within American legends and the picture of American homelife, and are often remembered for their longer narrative works. However, these writers also did not hesitate to address divisive cultural and political issues; the highly emphasized moral tones in the writing centered around these topics is commonly thought to have been put into place in an attempt to sway their readers towards acting on these injustices that served as their poetic inspiration (“A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets”). Today this tone found frequently in Fireside poetry may come off as judgemental or even as chastising, but their political sensibility and awareness struck home with many Americans of the day. It was popular, too, with many poetry fans in England. In
fact, although Romanticism fell into disharmony with the more widely used Victorian style of poetry that ran rampant in Europe during the same time period, the Fireside Poets were the first group of American poets to gain as much popularity as any British group of authors, in their own country as well in Britain (“A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets”). Many would say that this widespread popularity was due not only to their attention to current issues in their works, but also their traditional, “nursery rhyme” structuring of their poetry that continues to appeal to so many today. This classical structuring carried over into “Footsteps of Angels”, a poem written by Longfellow about what he believes will happen when the time comes for him to die—“When the hours of Day are numbered” (“Footsteps of Angels”, line 1). He imagines that all those who passed away before him will come back to visit him; he will see all the fallen, brave soldiers who never made it out of battle; be visited by past missionaries and saints who changed the world; and finally, he will be called on by his so-cherished wife. He envisions his wife, “the Being Beauteous” (line 20), coming to him “With a slow and noiseless footstep” (line 24). He describes a scene in which they sit together before she finally escorts him to heaven. He draws the poem to a close by saying that all his “fears are laid aside/If I but remember only/Such as these have lived and died!” (Lines 37-40). Considering that Longfellow wrote this poem while in the throes of depression over the loss of his beloved wife, its meaning becomes apparent. He imagines what a blessing death will be when it finally comes to him. As he pictures fallen soldiers, ancient saints, and his wife, his “messenger divine” (line 25), coming to him at the end of his life—his wife even more tender and gentle than she was in her lifetime—he feels a calming sense of awareness. Longfellow realizes that, although life is hard without love, he must welcome both life and death equally. His closing stanza shows his acceptance of the hardships of life by way of the sudden epiphany of how many amazing people have come and gone before him; his realization that life and death—no matter what they entail—are both blessings, as well as two things that everyone on Earth must (or maybe is lucky enough to) experience.
This remarkable American poet stayed true to Fireside Poet fashion while composing his heartbreaking piece, Footsteps of Angels, during the Romantic literary era. He touched many readers in both his time and modern times with the soothing rhythm of his bittersweet, painful poetry. He was influential not only in America, but across the world, and his poetic passion and poise while writing about both grief and triumph is something that can ring just as true in the hearts of Americans today as it did in 1835.