Longfellow’s Image Due for a Face Lift

As the literary reputation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has eroded, so has the surface of a giant statue of the poet in his native city. But things are looking up--at least for the memorial.

One harbinger of change was a small wreath, green with pink and aqua ribbons, that sat in the bronze figure’s lap Wednesday, the 184th anniversary of Longfellow’s birth.

It was ignored by resident pigeons but lightened the seedy plot in the heart of Maine’s largest city.

That token is to be followed by a more lasting tribute to the man who wrote romantic odes of Hiawatha, Evangeline, Paul Revere and the village smithy.

Merchants, preservationists and children are banding together to restore the monument that was erected in 1888, just five years after the death of the man who then was one of the world’s reigning authors.

“The view is a little less poetic and more prosaic now,” said Herbert Adams, a state representative from the Parkside neighborhood who is leading the drive to resurrect the Longfellow Statue Assn. and revive the square around the memorial. “We’d like to be able to finish the statue by the fall.”

Fund raising began in January with a target of $11,000, coincidentally the same sum contributed a century ago to pay for the collaboration of sculptor Franklin Simmons and architect Francis Fassett.

And, just as the original memorial was financed in part by pennies collected by children, a group of Portland second-graders has come forward to help promote and pay for the restoration.

“The historic parallel is exact,” said Adams, a writer and history buff with little time for the harsh modern verdicts rendered on Longfellow’s works.

Longfellow, born to a prominent Portland family in 1807, was educated at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., and took up teaching there as a professor of modern languages. He later was a professor at Harvard.

Harvard Prof. Lawrence Buell, who has edited a collection of Longfellow’s poems, counts himself as a fan but affirms that “Longfellow’s stock has plummeted in the 20th Century.”

Buell said the years between the two world wars were “most crucial in flattening him,” as appetite subsided for Longfellow’s sentimental themes.

“And there’s no sign, particularly, of a revival,” he said, although he predicts that the earnest author will retain a place on school reading lists.

Derided in literary circles now as “overtly derivative,” Longfellow nonetheless holds a place in history as “the first American poet to achieve a public and a level of royalties that would have enabled him to live on it,” Buell said.

People do buy his works today, said Buell, joking that “maybe people in rest homes mostly.”

Still, he said: “I don’t think he’s going to go away.”

Certainly not if Adams has a say.

“He molded what we think of the American past,” said the Portland politician and Longfellow popularizer. Adams dismisses current critiques as “a bad rap.”

“Like Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda, he was so good at his craft that he made the effort look easy. . . . His time will come around again. As long as we endure, he will endure, because he shaped how the country looks to us.”