Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
and didactic. Now, readers appreciate the nuance and diversity, wide-ranging
scholarship, and linguistic knowledge available in Longfellow’s work. With T.
S. Eliot, Longfellow is the only American poet memorialized at Westminster
Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.
Born in Maine, Longfellow studied there, rst at Portland Academy then at
Bowdoin College, where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce were among
his classmates. Upon graduation, he was oered a professorship of modern
languages at Bowdoin. To prepare for this position, Longfellow traveled to Europe,
visiting France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and
England. Longfellow translated from the original the texts he taught at Bowdoin,
to the neglect of his own creative work. In 1831, he married Mary Storer Potter
(1812–1835) and published prose travel pieces in The New-England Magazine.
From 1835 to 1836, he once more traveled abroad to prepare for another teaching
position, at Harvard University, for which he acquired a greater knowledge of
Germanic and Scandinavian languages. While in Holland, his wife miscarried and
died. While touring Austria and Switzerland, he met Fanny Appleton, the woman
he would marry seven years later.
In 1839, he published Voices of the Night, his rst book of poetry. He followed
it with Ballads and Other Poems (1841), Poems on Slavery (1842), and a collection
of travel sketches in prose entitled The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846).
As noted in his May 30 diary entry, this latter collection traces its inspiration as
well as its artful execution to sound, to the perfect blending of sound and sense:
[T]hose chimes, those chimes! How deliciously they lull one to sleep! The little
bells, with their clear, liquid notes, like the voices of boys in a choir, and the
solemn bass of the great bell tolling in, like the voice of a friar!
Residing at Craigie House in Cambridge—a wedding gift from his wealthy,
industrialist father-in-law—Longfellow became a leading literary gure in not
only New England but also across the nation. He consolidated this position by
leaving academic life in 1854 to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1861, Fanny
Appleton Longfellow was burned to death after her dress caught re; subsequently,
Longfellow’s cosmopolitan and religious interests came to the fore in such works
as a three-volume translation in unrhymed triplets of Dante’s Divine Comedy
(1865–1871) and Christus: A Mystery, published in three parts (1872).
4.14.1 “A Psalm of Life”
(1839)
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
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