Favorite Poems

Front Cover
Dover, 1992 - 85 pages
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was the most popular American poet of his time, and one of the most famous American poets of all time. It has been said that certain of his poems-the long narratives Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha most notably-were once read in every literate home in America. A former teacher who fulfilled his dream to make a living as a poet, Longfellow taught at Bowdoin and Harvard, was eventually honored for his poetry with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and is one of the few Americans to have a monument dedicated to his memory in Westminster Abbey. This choice collection of his works, which reflects his mastery of a rich variety of poetic forms and meters, includes one of his best narrative poems, The Courtship of Miles Standish. Here, too, are such famous poems as "The Village Blacksmith," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," "The Children's Hour," "Paul Revere's Ride," and other poems on subjects ranging from lost youth and Giotto's Tower to slavery and the building of a ship. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "Paul Revere's Ride."

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About the author (1992)

During his lifetime, Longfellow enjoyed a popularity that few poets have ever known. This has made a purely literary assessment of his achievement difficult, since his verse has had an effect on so many levels of American culture and society. Certainly, some of his most popular poems are, when considered merely as artistic compositions, found wanting in serious ways: the confused imagery and sentimentality of "A Psalm of Life" (1839), the excessive didacticism of "Excelsior" (1841), the sentimentality of "The Village Blacksmith" (1839). Yet, when judged in terms of popular culture, these works are probably no worse and, in some respects, much better than their counterparts in our time. Longfellow was very successful in responding to the need felt by Americans of his time for a literature of their own, a retelling in verse of the stories and legends of these United States, especially New England. His three most popular narrative poems are thoroughly rooted in American soil. "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), an American idyll; "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the first genuinely native epic in American poetry; and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858), a Puritan romance of Longfellow's own ancestors, John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. "Paul Revere's Ride," the best known of the "Tales of a Wayside Inn"(1863), is also intensely national. Then, there is a handful of intensely personal, melancholy poems that deal in very successful ways with those themes not commonly thought of as Longfellow's: sorrow, death, frustration, the pathetic drift of humanity's existence. Chief among these are "My Lost Youth" (1855), "Mezzo Cammin" (1842), "The Ropewalk" (1854), "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1852), and, most remarkable in its artistic success, "The Cross of Snow," a heartfelt sonnet so personal in its expression of the poet's grief for his dead wife that it remained unpublished until after Longfellow's death. A professor of modern literature at Harvard College, Longfellow did much to educate the general reading public in the literatures of Europe by means of his many anthologies and translations, the most important of which was his masterful rendition in English of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-67).

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