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.
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
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