HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW ON (DEAD) LANGUAGE

The career of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) is in many ways contradictory, posing quite a distinctive historical puzzle. His status as both elite and popular; his once extravagant celebrity and now near total eclipse; his shrill enthusiasms and melancholic anxieties; all belie his current reputation as a poet of simple-minded and cheerful satisfactions. Longfellow as a figure attempts to bridge different aspects of American culture, starting with the problem of whether one existed at all. Passionately committed to the birth of a national literature, he devoted himself to establishing and extending an American poetic language. Like Whitman, Emerson, and many other men of letters and society, Longfellow felt called by the Revolution to the creation of a native literature that would do justice to the new American experience and represent its people. In “Our Native Writers” (1825), his graduation address, he called for a poetry that would express “our national character,” to be written by those who had “been nursed and brought up with us in the civil and religious freedom of our country.” And, in his ambition to speak for a new American people, he largely succeeded. The Song of Hiawatha appeared side by side with Leaves of Grass in bookstalls in 1855. Hiawatha sold 10,000 copies in the first four weeks and 30,000 copies in six months, while most of Whitman's first edition had to be given away. Yet Longfellow's poetry is essentially elegiac. If Longfellow succeeded in expressing America's newly emerging identity, he also records its anxieties and costs.