Longfellow’s Radical Americanism

“The proof of a poet,” Whitman wrote bravely in his “Preface” to the first or 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass,” “is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” He had himself in mind, of course, but that year the country barely noticed his self-published book for sale in Brooklyn shops, in marked contrast to the effusive response awaiting another book-length poem published by Ticknor and Fields in Boston just months later, “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A more ironically apt coincidence could not have been devised by the cunning of history: two poets, two books, each wishing to speak in authentic accents to and for the country, one in a familiar bardic tradition, singing of legends and myths in a regular meter, the other in an unfamiliar style of unrhymed cadences about an amorphous subject (“myself”), a strange brew of confession, prophecy and the language of the street.

Whitman staked his claim to the affection of his country on originality and freedom; Longfellow, on skilled borrowings and transmutations or cultural translation from “foreign” sources: in the case of “Hiawatha,” on Ojibwa legends retold in a meter taken from the national epic of Finland, “The Kalevala.” Longfellow’s poem was unmistakably literature, what everyone recognized as poetry, while Whitman’s book shouted defiance of those very canons of recognizability: He included no author’s name, no titles of poems, no obvious stanzas, no meter, no rhyme. “I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,” wrote Whitman, hardly a line designed to captivate readers of “Hiawatha.” “The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away,” he wrote in his declamatory Preface. But “proof” that year lay with poems that looked and sounded like poems--easy to read, perhaps to sing, to take to heart and put to memory.

The 1855 outcome has long since been reversed, Whitman now widely taken as the country’s major poet and Longfellow reduced to minor status. Whitman, it’s instructive to learn, found much to admire in the poet whose 1855 book had outpaced “Leaves of Grass” at the gate, especially his ability to bring “what is dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste.” While he “does not sing exceptional passions, or humanity’s jagged escapades,” “his songs soothe and heal, or if they excite, it is a healthy and agreeable excitement.” These remarks by the Whitman who had already settled into the persona of the Good Gray Poet help explain why Longfellow has never really disappeared; he remains popular, certainly with children hearing “Paul Revere’s Ride” or “The Children’s Hour” for the first time as well as with adults nostalgic for poems memorized long ago.

How did the shift in Longfellow’s fortune come about? One explanation comes in an equation: the rise of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot equals the fall of Longfellow et al. The “et al” are the so-called Fireside Poets, bearded chaps with austere but kindly faces, portraits hanging on classroom walls, guardians of Art and Morality for the good of the nation. Overthrown by “modernism,” which found their pieties, posturing and pandering to public taste boring and stifling, these poets had further abuse heaped on them by the “progressive” young intellectuals who, in the ‘10s and ‘20s undertook to rewrite American literary and cultural history in quest of a “usable past.” It was this group, lead by Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, who rediscovered Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, found new value in Emerson and Hawthorne and placed Whitman at the heart of what Hart Crane called the “American psychosis.” Except for Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, no poet or critic among the first generation of modernists or Americanists found anything of value in Longfellow except a negative example. Brooks saw him as a pallid idealist who viewed the world as a “pretty picture-book”; he added, “Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music; approached critically he simply runs on, and there is an end to the matter” (so much for Mr. Brooks’ ear). The critical and professorial opinion has been that Longfellow pales in importance against his luminous contemporaries, including his close friends Hawthorne and Emerson.

Something more than a sharp turn of the wheel of taste is needed to explain such an extreme reversal of reputation. A casualty in the century’s first culture war (call it the “rise of modernism” or “revolt against the genteel tradition”), Longfellow defined a fault-line between old and new conceptions of poetry: What is it, how can we know if it’s any good and for what ends? With the luck of someone perfectly placed in space and time, Longfellow had crystallized in his 19th century career a role for poetry as an indispensable public discourse for the new nation, an educated, “literary” discourse which mixed pieties and certitudes with universalizing melancholy, doubts overcome in sweet uplifting melodies. He commanded a faithful audience in a society less severely stratified than it would become after the Civil War. Longfellow’s credentials for his chosen vocation of public poet to the nation were near-perfect: born into an old American family, schooled at Bowdoin College with Hawthorne as classmate, honored with the first chair of modern languages at Bowdoin just after graduation, then successor at Harvard to the venerable George Ticknor, founder of the field of modern languages (what we now call comparative literature).

Longfellow steeped himself in European languages and literatures; through translation and more subtly, through a kind of alembic process, he filtered the air of European cultivation into his American writings. “Poems distilled from other poems” (can there be any other kind, after all?) puts well the program Longfellow embraced for a new country outgrowing its touchy backwardness and dependency. His most popular poems raised native themes, legends and landscapes into memorable narrative verse. Yet Longfellow was far from parochial; his goal was to infuse a cosmopolitan tone into American letters. His success was triumphal. In 1854, even before the windfall of “Hiawatha,” income from his writings was good enough for him to quit teaching and live by pen alone, the nation’s first professional poet. Honors accrued to him as if he were royalty. So did personal losses and tragedies: the early death of his first wife and the shattering of his deliriously happy second marriage to Fanny Appleton, daughter of a wealthy Boston banker, by her hideous death in 1861 when her dress caught fire. Longfellow attempted to smother the flames with a blanket and was so badly injured that he was unable to attend the funeral. Only in one poem, “The Cross of Snow,” written 18 years afterward, did Longfellow refer explicitly to this devastation. But his flowing beard, which made his face so familiar (particularly when photographed in profile), gave daily reminder of trauma and loss: He grew it to cover his scarred face.

Then the great shift in taste and ideology occurred demoting him to minor status. Shaped by the stringent ideology of early modernism and by “usable past” cultural revisionism, academic judgment of Longfellow has usually served some other end, to bolster a modernist idea of poetry or an Americanist idea of what is “really” American. And there’s something else at play in the “question of Longfellow.” I mean the issue of cultural power, the power of the professoriate’s opinions.

Longfellow remains one of the nation’s abidingly popular poets; more poems of his are probably still taken to heart and committed to memory than those of any of his more luminous 19th century peers, Emerson, Whitman, Melville or Dickinson. More than a matter of taste alone, the Longfellow question belongs to the history of debate about highbrow and lowbrow, minority culture and mass civilization, aesthetic elitism and cultural populism. The odd thing, and this points to one of Longfellow’s remarkable traits, is that he himself was elitist to the core, yet in his own day he was accepted and admired by readers in all classes, up and down, high and low; he felt no torment about popularity and took obvious pleasure in mastering many poetic genres, from penny-style ballads to dramatic narratives and tragic poems, from melancholy lyrics of the night and the sea to a wonderful group of sonnets on “The Divine Comedy”; some readers think his translation of Dante his best work. From his American poems--”Hiawatha,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” “The Ride of Paul Revere” and “Evangeline”--to his considerably less successful “Christus” poems on the history of Christianity to his splendid translations and the exquisite versification in his shorter lyrics, Longfellow represents a literary culture of range, depth and variety that is stunning to imagine as once having been shared experience in this country.

How did he manage to hold together a national audience of diverse parts? Often it was a matter of address, gathering readers, like children answering a father’s call, into a single enthralled audience:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

Irresistible, even if, on reflection, just a bit banal. It’s not Whitman who served as the great Populist democrat among 19th century poets but Longfellow with his common touch. Better than Whitman, when it comes to the absorptive powers, Longfellow understood what his readers wanted from poetry, what they needed in way of “higher” experience, recognition of a common humanity in their personal griefs and pains and joys, the sheer pleasure of a distracting tale in repeatable verse. The historian of literary culture in the United States has something to learn from a fresh look at this figure who has come down to us more as a plaster bust than as a living poet.

It’s a good time to go back to Longfellow. Modernist absolutism and intolerance have lost their once fierce hold in the academy and a new openness to variety holds out a friendlier hand to traditional metered verse. New interest in Robinson and Frost may be a harbinger of better times for Longfellow. “Longfellow was always an artist,” Robinson wrote, “and people mustn’t forget that.” Frost took the title of his first book, “A Boy’s Will” (1913), from the haunting refrain in Longfellow’s ballad, “My Lost Youth”:

A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

In many ways his heir, Frost in 1907, while teaching in New Hampshire, composed a poem, “The Later Minstrel,” for the school’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Longfellow’s birth. It was later set to music and sung at the school’s opening exercises. In it Frost says that though the old poet’s “minstrel days of old” can’t be expected to return, his lesson is that

Song’s time and season are its own,

Its ways past finding out,

But more and more it fills the earth,

And triumphs over doubt.

It’s fitting that the new Library of America edition, “Poems and Other Writings,” arrives not from a professorial hand but the hand of a distinguished poet, J. D. McClatchy. A hundred and twenty-seven poems, 15 translations, a novel (“Kavanaugh”) and three essays, together with a fulsome chronology and succinct helpful notes: The edition serves perfectly to bring the poet’s best works, identified by another poet’s ear and eye, to readers new and old. It’s the only recent edition of the poems that approaches a “complete poems,” supplemented with important prose. McClatchy’s passion for awakening new readers to the delights of the old poet has extended to a series of readings he has conducted across the country, including performances of poems set to music by the likes of Charles Ives and others. The poet who emerges has been well-served, as has the reader, by the flawless taste and the historical good sense of the editor. (One wishes space had also allowed for the inclusion of the “Coplas de Manrique,” “the most beautiful moral poem” in Spanish, said Longfellow, and beautifully translated by him.)

Whitman offers a clue to the tenacity of Longfellow’s hold on a broad variegated audience when he describes the poet’s devotion to “what is always dearest as poetry” as a “counteractant” to the “self-assertive, money-worshiping” culture of Gilded Age America. In an early essay on Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry,” Longfellow himself embraced the notion of poetry as a kind of chemical solvent of social corruption. Society, he wrote in 1832, puts too much value on profit, acquisition, utility. But poetry offers an alternative vision: “true greatness is the greatness of the mind; the true glory of a nation is moral and intellectual preeminence.” Rather than a useless activity, poetry “may be made, and should be made, an instrument for improving the condition of society.” How did he mean this? Less by affixing didactic homilies at the end of poems than by teaching and charming together in one gesture, teaching through delight that poetry itself can be an anodyne to profit, acquisition and utility, to a culture of moral blindness and rampant selfishness. Longfellow’s sympathy for slaves (“Poems on Slavery”), for the defeated and displaced Indian (“To a Driving Cloud”), for “the great army of the poor” (“To a Child”) shows him to be a good citizen of New England in its passion for social justice and benevolence. The word “universal” captures a good deal of Longfellow’s intentions for poetry: The personal and the private become the basis of what is common to all people and goes toward the making of an inclusive “fireside” audience.

The “classic” Longfellow was the public poet of the most popular narratives drawn from the (mainly) New England past. In the 1840s his story-poems beat to the rhythms of mounting national self-confidence even in the face of the rising crisis over slavery. His lyrics, meanwhile, as early as his first and significantly titled volume, “The Voices of the Night” (1839), sing in a different, lower and darker register. They catch an undercurrent of doubt and apprehension, vestiges of the self-scrutiny (without the obsessive introspection) of the old Puritanism. It’s in his shorter lyrics that a theory of poetry begins to appear as a prominent concern. In this first volume the word “psalm” carries an idea of the poet as a secular singer of sacred thoughts, addressed to “the soul.” “The Light of Stars” strikes an ironic note that hints at depths to be explored, only to deviate in the end, as the poem turns from images of strife (“the red planet Mars”) to the hortatory and hopeful:

And thou, too, whosoe’er thou art,

That readest this brief psalm,

As one by one thy hopes depart,

Be resolute and calm.

The most famous lyric in this early volume, “A Psalm of Life,” takes a similar tack, though the awful possibility that “Life is but an empty dream,” that “things are not what they seem,” gets no chance to sink in as a real occasion of dread; consolation begins at once: “Tell me not . . . “ The “psalm of life,” the living poem, demonstrates itself: “Act,” it says, “act in the living Present,” and by saying so the poem itself performs the act.

It makes sense that Longfellow should devote so many of his shorter, more immediately absorbable poems to articulating a theory of poetry as secular consolation, as translation of fear, dread, grief, disappointment into a universal and thus bearable condition. This is the bridging or pontificating work of poetry, in poems like “The Poets,” “The Broken Oar,” “The Poet and His Songs.” It may be that translation or bridging is often too easily achieved, an unearned resolution to a conflict disallowed, as in “The Light of Stars” and “Seaweed,” but surely not more so than in other 19th-century poets, including Whitman in his great odes on death. “Birds of Passage,” a lovely meditation in an intricate rhythm, shows Longfellow at his lyrical best on his characteristic theme of poetry:

They are the throngs

Of the poet’s songs,

Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

The sound of winged words.

Poetry often appears at night, wrapped in darkness, as in the remarkable ballad worthy of Robinson, “The Fire of Drift-Wood,” a wonderfully precise and subtle realization of the drifting apart of old friends.

In his introduction to “The Oxford Book of American Verse” in 1950, F. O. Matthiessen wrote about Longfellow that it’s time to “smash the plaster bust of his dead reputation.” But there’s “a quickening imagination and a mastery of delicate versification” to be revived and enjoyed. The McClatchy edition shows there are more than a few poems worth salvaging and relishing: the six sonnets on “The Divine Comedy” and “Eliot’s Oak,” lyrics like “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls,” the exquisite music of a darker, sadder mood in “Afternoon in February” and “Curfew,” the perfect “Aftermath” and “The Rope-Walk,” one of the finest lyrics of the 19th century. Longfellow sings movingly about the making of things, the labor and the craft of building a ship, working a smithy, molding clay on a potter’s wheel (in “Keramos”), spinning rope: all figures for the grand preoccupation of his life, the making of tight and shapely poems. It’s good to have him available again on fresh, bright pages.